With the dairy season at is peak, farmers breaching their resource consents have appeared on the West Coast Regional Council’s black list for the first time in months.

The council’s compliance report for December lists four farms where the effluent rules were not being followed.

At Haupiri, a farmer was served with an infringement notice after an inspection revealed a standoff pad used through the winter was too close to a creek.

A Whataroa farmer has had a formal warning, after an effluent pond was found flowing into a paddock. Though the farm had resource consent to discharge effluent to land, the area was in flood at the time.

At Kowhitirangi, a dairy farmer faces a fine after council staff inspecting the property found the effluent ponds were poorly maintained and polluting stormwater drains.

An Atarau farmer may also be penalised after samples taken from the farm’s effluent pond discharge were found to be over the compliance limits.

In other environmental incidents, council staff are stumped in their search for a sand burglar at Ruatapu.

They investigated a complaint that someone had been removing trailer loads of sand at night from the dunes and though that is a breach of the regional rules there were “no avenues open for inquiries”.

Two illegal dumping incidents were discovered during the month: one at Blaketown and one near the Grey River.

Both sites are consented for clean fill. But at the site near Blaketown beach – where only soil, sand and clay can be dumped – council staff found concrete and other material buried over the western face of the site.

The consent holder told the council that people had been dumping there after the locked gate was vandalised, and he has been sent a warning letter.

At the Grey River site, council staff who inspected the dump found a small quantity of non-clean fill material and told the consent holder to remove it.

Two weeks later, after a complaint, they found demolition material including painted timber and treated piles had been dumped on the site and set on fire.

The consent holder has been fined and served with two abatement notices.

Several other complaints were not upheld. A whitebaiter at Fairdown alerted the council twice to discolouration in Deadman’s Creek.

In the first incident council staff found the cause was incoming tidal water. In the second, staff found a pipe discharging water from a paddock drain, which some cows had just walked through.

The sediment was not visible several metres below the pipe and the council found no breach of the rules.

Staff checked out a complaint that a drain was causing flooding of the road and nearby properties at Hari Hari, but found the highway was flooded in several places after heavy rain and no rules were being broken.

A complaint that a Franz Josef property owner was doing drainage work that could flood his neighbour’s land was resolved when the pair got together and sorted it out for themselves, council staff reported.

A complaint about a white substance going into the Hokitika River from a stormwater pipe drew a blank – the water was clean when staff checked it. The drain was not related to the Westland Milk Products factory, they noted.

A complaint about stock pugging the margins of a lagoon at Ruatapu was not upheld – staff found no breach of the regional rules.

The council is still investigating a complaint about the extraction of gravel from a small creek at Mitchells.

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