Erin Brockovich's message to a Water NZ industry conference is that communities can - and must - stand up and fight. Photo: MICHAEL SWENSEN
An American water warrior immortalised by Hollywood has told a New Zealand crowd that water problems are getting much worse.
But Erin Brockovich's message to a Water NZ industry conference is that communities can - and must - stand up and fight.
Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her portrayal of Erin Brockovich in the 2000 film of the same name, about an unschooled single mother's dogged fight to bring the water polluter of a California town to justice.
Thirty years on, Brockovich is still in the fight, using what she calls her best trait: "Stick-to-itiveness".
"I began my work out in that small desert town when I was a young single mom, 31 years old," she told the conference.
"And here I am today, 63, and a grandmother of four, and the fight has not gotten any better. The situation has not gotten any better. In fact, the situation has gotten much worse."
The polluting power company in Hinkley, California, settled for half a billion dollars in 1996.
But Brockovich said the town itself could not survive.
"Today the small town in Hinkley is gone.
"There is no life there. The company now owns all the land and is under a 100-year clean-up order."
Poisoned water was certain to have health impacts, no matter where it occurred, she said.
Brockovich said things would get worse "as we continue to assume, or believe, that some entity will just swoop down in here and correct all of these water issues, or we continue to kick the can down the line, or we continue to believe that we as an individual, right at that local level, can't stand up".
There was no shortage of threats coming down the pipe, the conference heard earlier.
Among them, nitrates - primarily from dairy effluent - and the chemical focus of another Hollywood movie, Dark Waters - PFAS or "forever chemicals".
Tonkin + Taylor consultant Andrew Pearson told a workshop the level of uncertainty about what PFAS substances do to water, and to human health, required taking precautions.
"The point of action is ensuring that for these substances that are persistent, very mobile, even if there's question marks on toxicity, that we do have that captured during the chemical approval in the regulatory system for allowing hazardous substances to be used," Pearson said.
In March, the US set what were called "extraordinary new limits" on PFAS in drinking water.
These were much stricter than New Zealand's guidelines, said Pearson. This country copied Australia's maximum thresholds in the wake of the Defence Force revealing contamination around its bases in 2017, he said.
Just one study had been done since on how much PFAS was in groundwater here, he said.
Overseas, although the three common PFAS compounds that come from the likes of firefighting foam were in decline, other newer, untested short-chain and ultra-short-chain PFASs were turning up in drinking water.
It was a similar story for nitrates in local water, Otago University senior research fellow Tim Chambers told the conference.
He noted significant blind spots, amid rising rates of the prevalence of nitrates - primarily from increasing dairy herds - and rising worries about their impacts on public health.
Fixing nitrates could prove expensive: $600 million for all of Christchurch's drinking water supply, Chambers said.
Brockovich told the audience their actions would count.
"It's very daunting, and I think it will continue to be if we don't find ourselves and know that (we) must be involved; we must speak up."