BALCLUTHA HOSPITAL DRAINAGE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20536, 11 October 1928, Page 6

BALCLUTHA HOSPITAL DRAINAGE

XO THE EDITOR. Sir.. — 1 notice from your report of the meeting of the South Otago Hospital Board in to-day’s issue that the board’s request to the Balclutha Borough for permission to run a drain pipe through the embankment that protects the town from floods has been granted by the council, subject to the consent of the Public Works Department being obtained. Now, sir, the Public Works Department was responsible for the construction of the bank, and recently a lot of Government money was expended in strengthening it. Surely, now to allow it to be pierced by a drain pipe would be the supreme folly. The quantity of flood water that has penetrated the open drain pipes near the Borough Council Chambers, and rendered it necessary for the town clerk to cross to his office on a plank, is surely sufficient evidence of the danger of allowing even rabbit holes to be made in a flood protective embankment. But there is another aspect of the matter upon which the Hospital Board's application evidently did not enlarge, and that is the nature of the drainage which it is proposed to cast into the Molyneux, through the gracious courtesy of the Borough Council and the Public Works Department. It is really deleterious drainage, which the board has been trying to dispose of elsewhere for years. It is not the effluent from the septic tanks, as some suppose, but fluid loaded with disinfectants which might be depended on to kill a South American cobra at short range, let alone a Molyneux trout. Trusting that the Public Works Department, it not the Acclimatisation Society, may take a hand in the matter.—l am. etc., Protection. Baklutha, October 10, 1928!