Ashburton Clean Heat plans move ahead

Ashburton people can breathe a sigh of relief - the higher than usual air pollution produced during last winter's Big Snow will not be the basis for an air pollution analysis for the town.

The Ashburton Air Joint Working Party has proposed that the analysis of Ashburton's air pollution problem should be based on data from 2000, not 2006. The Working Party consists of representatives from Environment Canterbury and the Ashburton District Council.

In order to set a target to reduce air pollution to meet the National Environmental Standards in 2013, ECan bases its estimates of the reductions required on the highest pollution year for a particular area. In Ashburton's case it was 2006.

However, Ashburton District Council and the Ashburton community in general have been concerned about using 2006 for the analysis because of last year's big snow storm.

Ashburton regional councillor, and co-chair of the Ashburton Air Joint Working Party, Angus McKay says last year's adverse weather conditions resulted in "different behaviour".

"Because of the conditions people had to live in, many people ran out of dry wood and used wet wood from fallen trees to keep their heating going. However we need to watch the monitoring results closely to make sure that 2006 was indeed the anomaly we think it was," he says.

He says the National Environmental Standards for air were established by the Ministry for the Environment, but Environment Canterbury has the task of enforcing them.

"These standards determine that by 2013 no town or city is allowed more than one high pollution night per year. In order to reduce the costs of achieving that target, we have to make sure that we work with the best available data," he says.

Meanwhile Environment Canterbury has set up four additional temporary pollution monitoring sites in Ashburton to supplement the data collected at the permanent site in Cambridge Street. The additional sites in Cambridge, Clark, Dobson and East Streets will address concerns that gathering data at only one site may be misleading.

So far the additional sites have provided data which confirms the initial estimations of Ashburton's air quality, says Ashburton District councillor, Robin Kilworth, who co-chairs the Joint Working Party.

ENDS

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