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In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. I
by FooHentai 6y ago
In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. It was touch-and-go on declaring it a national disaster but in the end it wasn't, and it fell to volunteers to clean up the surface evidence of the spill, at least what hadn't made it down the fox river and out to sea.
Quite a bit more of that kind of thing expected with the increase in extreme weather events from climate change. In Westland alone there are another 12 at-risk old landfill sites. It's estimated that the cost of preventing further spills from the one already-open landfill alone is ~2.3M. In an economically depressed region like Westland it won't be funded, and they're far from the only region in NZ that's facing this problem. Just the first to have experienced a spill event.
- theptip 6y agoI think cleaning up old sites should be prioritized; this is kind of the same commons maintenance as decommissioning old nuclear reactors. Unfortunately the purely-for-profit structure of these long-term ventures can mean that there is no money to cover the cleanup if things go really wrong, depending on who owns the site. I think you need to look at some sort of cleanup fund in escrow as a precondition for building sites like this, which should incentivize improvements in safety measures too.
- FooHentai 6y agoFor sure, I’ve argued for an equivalent of the superfund for NZ previously, and to bring it to bear on site remediations such as this. It’s not a perfect model, but heck it’s better than doing things ad-hoc and asking for point funding, turning things that should have been foreseen and managed over the long term into unpleasant sudden surprises.