Water Usage to Be Limited

HAWKE’S BAY Regional Council has moved to stop rivers drying up next summer by raising minimum water flows.

Environmentalists were upset last summer when low river flows increased the concentration of pollution from sewage and farm runoff into the Tukituki River.

The district health board advised people to avoid mats of smelly blue-green algae that had developed in the river. The algae could make people sick, and kill dogs.

From now on taking water from the river will be banned when its flow drops to 1900 litres a second, instead of 1600.

“They’ve done something right,” Hawke’s Bay Environmental Water Group spokesman David Renouf said yesterday.

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