The world’s most polluted marine reserve?

WellingtonScoop: The world’s most polluted marine reserve?
It’s a big deal that someone was caught fishing in the marine reserve? But what about the marine life under the water that’s being killed? The bladder kelp beds in Lyall Bay are dying as a result of waste water, petroleum and endocrine chemicals that bubble up from the Wellington City Council’s broken waste water pipe off Te Raekaihau Point (and that is also why the beaches get closed).

Who else knows about the value of bladder kelp? Are we only interested in what we see on top of the water?

Beach cast seaweed now comes ashore burnt and black from the chemicals and therefore provides little value for marine species or sea birds. Sea gulls don’t sit on it to get a better view of the sea. They are trying to obtain their food source from it before the tide comes in and bait fish eat the life in it. So did the City Council and the Department of Conservation protect this valuable food source full of protein that fish require for successful spawning? No. For the only beach of sand in the whole marine reserve, they obtained the right to remove it.

The City Council and DOC aren’t interested in the marine reserve’s water quality either. The council plans to send untreated stormwater into the reserve for ten years. Stormwater is full of petroleum products and the chemicals that are used to remove mould on houses; it’s a foaming mass of chemicals that reaches the sea and kills the algae which are the very beginning of the marine food chain. Collect the water and put in on your garden, if you dare. But there is a law for some and another law for others.

The existence of the reserve hides the fact that we have legally created the most heavily polluted marine reserve in the world. Our organisation opposed the resource consent to discharge waste water and endocrine chemicals into Lyall Bay for thirty-five years. We took the Wellington City Council to the Environment Court and tried to get the pipe extended into water fifty metres deep so that our prevailing northwesterlies could break down the product before it went through the reserve. Who supported us through the Environment Court? No one.

Wellington does not deserve a marine reserve.
Jim Mikoz is president of the Wellington Recreational Marine Fishers Association