Coast Care's Lorraine Adams has resisted the Waitaki District Council's plan to install 30cm geotextile tube sand mattresses in front of the Oamaru Creek little blue penguin colony from the outset of the project.
And yesterday, with work under way, she said the work already appeared to have disturbed what once was a timber treatment site on Oamaru's foreshore.
Due to erosion, the former ``toxic waste dump'' was much closer to the coastal marine area than either the ORC or the district council believed. And further, she said, the clean-up of the site, after she brought it to the attention of authorities in the early 1990s, was inadequate.
``There was concrete sticking out of the bank yesterday,'' she said.
``It's still there, it hasn't gone away.
``I want the regional council to actually find out where that [timber treatment site] is now.
``Someone needs to come up and just have a look at what's gone on.''
The district council's roading manager, Michael Voss, said the council was ``actually stepping ahead of the game by doing this'' work.
``The work is going on the active, live beach as it is now,'' Mr Voss said. ``What we are doing, of course, by putting in the mattresses is actually protecting it from further contamination.''
An ORC spokesman pointed to a report from August last year, in which council consent officer Charles Horrell first addressed Mrs Adams' concerns.
``This condition refers to the disturbance of a contaminated site, which is outside the scope of this consent process, therefore this condition should not be implemented as a condition of consent,'' the report states.
