Asia-Pacific News
New Zealand farmers dump milk following gas pipeline leak
Oct 25, 2011, 20:35 GMT
Wellington - About 6,000 New Zealand farmers dumped their cows' milk on their fields Wednesday after the country's biggest dairy company was forced to shut down 15 processing factories when their natural gas supply dried up.
The main pipeline distributing natural gas from the Maui field off the west coast to thousands of commercial users in the top half of the North Island was shut down Tuesday after a leak was discovered.
Officials of the pipeline operator Vector Ltd said the leak was in steep and difficult terrain and it was not known how long it would take to repair.
The Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd, the world's biggest exporter of dairy products, said about 30 million litres of milk would be wasted every day, at a cost of 20 million New Zealand dollars daily (16 million US dollars).
Fonterra said that 6,000 of its 10,500 farmer-supplies were affected. Because it was not possible to stop milking cows twice-daily, and they did not have facilities to store it, the milk would have to be sprayed on their fields until processing could resume.
Vector said several hundred major industrial users of gas and thousands of small businesses were likely to be without power.
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