John MacDonald: Christchurch's seven-year stench

Talk about déjà vu.  The smell from the burnt-out wastewater treatment plant at Bromley has been a shocker this week and people have had a gutsful.  City councillor Yani Johanson says making people wait for another three years is totally unacceptable and the council needs to get it sorted sooner. I think it’s ridiculous that it has taken over four years for the problem to still exist.  I agree that it should be fixed sooner. But I don’t have any hope of that happening. Because the council has cocked this up from the outset and seems incapable of doing it any faster. Which tells me that it has learnt next to nothing.  Remember it did the big mea culpa and admitted that, at the very least, it could have communicated better with people living in the area? And how it was going to do a better job blah blah blah. Right from the start, the council had this “we know best” attitude and was very dismissive of people’s concerns. And it’s still at it. It’s doing a very good job of explaining why it’s so bad this week - that the recent heavy rain seems to be behind it. Which is all very well. But, as I’ve said many times, people don’t care what you know - until they know that you care. And I don’t see the council showing too much care. Did you see the council guy on the news last night go all sheep-ish when he was asked about compo or support for people living with the stench?        But it’s not just Bromley that’s affected. I was in Mairehau yesterday and the smell was really bad.  But I’m not living with it all the time. Unlike Gaylene Ratima. She lives in Bromley and she woke up at 4 o’clock the other morning thinking the dog had done something on the carpet. She soon realised that the rotten egg smell had nothing to do with the dog and that it was coming from outside the house. It was the stench from the wastewater treatment plant seeping-in through the windows and doors - which were all closed. Imagine what that must be like. In fact, she reckons the smell this week is worse than it was after the treatment plant fire back in November 2021. Which is why councillor Yani Johanson is saying today that making people wait for another three years for the smell problem to be fixed is totally unacceptable and the council needs to get it sorted sooner.  As he points out - the way things are going, it’s going to take longer than it took to build the new One New Zealand stadium.   The fire was in November 2021 - over four years ago - and the council’s going to take another three years to fix it. Totally unacceptable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.