In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. It was touch-and-go on declaring it a national disaster but in the end it wasn't, and it fell to volunteers to clean up the surface evidence of the spill, at least what hadn't made it down the fox river and out to sea.

Quite a bit more of that kind of thing expected with the increase in extreme weather events from climate change. In Westland alone there are another 12 at-risk old landfill sites. It's estimated that the cost of preventing further spills from the one already-open landfill alone is ~2.3M. In an economically depressed region like Westland it won't be funded, and they're far from the only region in NZ that's facing this problem. Just the first to have experienced a spill event.