Low Priority For Hornby Sewerage

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29841, 6 June 1962, Page 15

Low Priority For Hornby Sewerage

There was not one person in New Zealand able to say. to within four or five years, when Hornby and Islington were going to get sewerage, the chairman of the Christchurch Drainage Board (Mr F. R. Price) told 21 persons who attended a meeting of the Hornby Residents’ Association last evening at Hornby. Hornby and Islington were both part of the board’s stage three reticulation scheme and the priorities for which areas would have contracts let first would be made next year, he said. In the past the board had decided the priorities on the basis of soakage, the length of time the area had been in the board’s area, the number of complaints and petitions received by the board and the ease of carrying out the sewerage installation. The board’s engineer had listed 19 unsewered areas in 1959. These were tentative priorities which would be reviewed next year. Mr Price said.

Soakage generally in Hornby and Islington was reported to be satisfactory and Hornby had been rated eighteenth out of 19 and Islington nineteenth. In the listing on the length of time in the board’s district combined with the complaints and petitions received. Hornby was again eighteenth and Islington nineteenth. For the ease of carrying opt the installation Hornby rated seventeenth and Islington nineteenth, he said. Mr Price said that an area which was the last on the. list of the priorities could not expect to get sewerage for four or five years after the first contracts for stage three of the reticulation scheme had been let. None of the contracts would be let until 1964.

Work on laying a main line up Buchanans road to Carmen road would be done soon. This was to do away with the septic tanks which the board had reluctantly taken over from the Ministry of Works. A number of houses would be able, if the owners wished, to be connected to that main sewer, he said.

“Hard To Justify” The president of the association (Mr E. P. Winter) said that he considered the position of Hornby and Islington at the end of the priorities hard to justify. For its size. Hornby contributed as much as any area in New Zealand for industry and a residential area. The whole area was being held up both for industrial and residential development because of the lack of sewerage and the experts who had given consideration to the priorities ought to have taken the potentiality of the district into account. One resident at the meeting asked if the board had carried out maintenance on the septic tanks. The pump had stopped at various times and water had filled his section to a height of 14in. He said that employees of the board had inspected the section and walked out without doing anything, Mr Price asked if the section was any worse at present than it had been when the Ministry of Works controlled the septic tanks. The tanks were emptied at times to reduce the difficulties. Another resident complained of "constant wetness”

in the area near one of the tanks. Mr Price said that the problem was constant where soakage was bad. .He thought that even if the Health Department were brought in, nothing could be done more quickly than was being done. ■ Several residents said that the rating was unfair.

Mr Price said that there was a land drainage rate which was completely separate from a sewerage rate Houses in Hei Hei which were connected to the septic tanks paid the full sewerage rates.