Piggery too pungent for nearby noses

A Morrinsville piggery whose acrid stench left neighbours with burning eyes and headaches and schoolchildren holding their noses in class has been fined $45,000.

Owner Ken McIntyre plans to move and may expand but declined to identify the new location.

Mr McIntyre has now been fined $95,000 after three prosecutions since 2007 for odour and other consent breaches at his Hutchinson Rd piggery, near the Kereone school and hall and several homes and farms.

He told the Waikato Times he had found a new site for the piggery "elsewhere in the Waikato" and had made an offer to purchase the land subject to the success of consent applications currently being prepared.

The piggery has struggled to comply with its resource consents at its present location and Mr McIntyre conceded the site was "not ideal", particularly as his 1150 pigs were housed near the property's boundary.

In 2006, Mr McIntyre was warned for unlawful effluent discharges, then in 2007 was prosecuted by Environment Waikato on a range of environmental charges, including one odour offence, and fined $15,000. In 2008, he was fined $35,000 for "discharging odorous contaminants" after 81 complaints in five months. Additional to the $45,000 fine for the latest offending was an enforcement order reinforcing a condition of the operation's resource consent requiring the removal of all pigs from the piggery by June next year.

Mr McIntyre said if the new site could be operational sooner than then he would shift before the deadline. He said he had been caught in a "catch-22" situation trying to address odour complaints by decommissioning an effluent pond which required spreading the effluent on paddocks.

Between January and March last year 14 complaints from 10 sites, including the school, were received.

The latest fine was imposed by Judge Craig Thompson at the Hamilton District Court this week after Mr Mcintyre pleaded guilty to a representative charge he had breached an abatement notice issued by council in 2007.

Two distinct types of odours were reported – an "acrid, chemical" smell which residents could taste and caused burning eyes and throats, and headaches, and a "sickly sweet pig and pungent dead animal smell".

Residents were forced to keep their homes closed up over summer to try to keep the smell out, and two households and the school installed air conditioning systems. The school said its children were at times forced to pinch their noses in class to escape the odours.

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