phosphorus

Two faces of a lake – Lake Rotoiti

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Lake Rotoiti is one of a number of lakes which lie to the east and south of Lake Rotorua, the second largest lake in the North Island. The lakes were created as a result of a volcanic eruption about 240,000 years ago, and were for hundreds of years the ancestral home and source of food and other resources for the Te Arawa people.

Today, the land around the lakes is almost without exception developed – either as urban or rural settlements or farmland – with almost no indigenous forest remaining [click here to view satellite image showing the extent of development around the lake]. Continue reading →

From cesspits to sewers: a tale of wastewater treatment

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The post on the history of pollution in the Manawatu River has been one of the most popular posts on this website. This post adds to that story with a history of Palmerston North’s sometimes beleaguered sewerage system.

In the 1870s, the early years of the township, there was no sewage network. Instead, households had “long-drops”, while hotels and boarding houses built cesspits to bury “nightsoil”. By 1877, the odour from these was becoming unbearable in some locations, and in 1879, the borough council prohibited the digging of open cesspits, instead creating a ten acre “sanitary reserve” for the burial of nightsoil and household refuse.

Continue reading →