Rotorua Airport land is leaking forever chemicals into a tourism icon

A contamination finding with no owner

PFAS – the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as “forever chemicals” – have been confirmed moving through groundwater into Lake Rotorua from a former firefighting training area on Rotorua Airport land. An investigation carried out between late 2025 and April 2026 found PFAS in groundwater, lake water, sediment and soil, consistent with historic foam use.

Levels near the airport sit below the threshold of threat to human health, but that is where the reassurance stops. The report warned levels were high enough to warrant urgent investigation into whether the chemicals are accumulating in fish, shellfish and other mahinga kai harvested from the area, and recommended a rahui on customary harvesting while that work happens. Te Arawa Lakes Trust representative Nicki Douglas put it plainly: “The levels are high enough that we should be warning people not to take kai from that part of the lake.”

Three agencies, one problem, zero volunteers

When the findings landed at Tuesday’s Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes Strategy Group meeting, the accountability gap was obvious. Rotorua Airport made clear it will not lead monitoring beyond its own boundary, with CEO Nicole Brewer noting the foams were “considered industry best practice at the time and were widely used internationally”.

Rotorua Lakes Council infrastructure manager Stavros Michael argued the Bay of Plenty Regional Council should lead the broader bioaccumulation work, adding that “just because one site by the airport has identified potential for bioaccumulation does not mean that is the whole lake”. Regional council chair Matemoana McDonald acknowledged the trust’s frustration – “I don’t want to leave the room with you frustrated” – but made no commitment to lead or fund the next stage. The strategy group then endorsed the recommendations and delegated the whole thing to a steering group, pushing the problem one rung further down.

The rules create the gap

Under the Resource Management Act, the landowner or polluter is generally responsible for managing land contamination. That works when contamination stays inside a fence line. It breaks down the moment a plume crosses a boundary into a shared waterway, which is precisely what has happened here.

The money makes it worse. The national Contaminated Sites Remediation Fund offers around $2.6 million per year across every contaminated site in the country, on a competitive basis, and is not typically available for Crown sites. That is the entire national remediation budget against a country dotted with legacy PFAS sites. All PFAS firefighting foams were only completely banned in New Zealand from December 2025 – Rotorua’s contamination is a legacy liability from products that were legal and endorsed when used.

Ohakea shows where this ends

If you want to know how a New Zealand PFAS dispute plays out over time, look at Base Ohakea. Contamination there was identified in April 2015 but neighbours were not told until December 2017, a delay NZDF’s own environmental services director called a “conscious decision.” The plume now affects around 3,600 hectares and could remain in groundwater for 125 to 150 years.

Back in 2018, RNZ reported that NZDF failed to hand Horizons Regional Council the groundwater modelling it needed, leaving ratepayers asked to fund an investigation into contamination caused by an entity that pays no rates. The pattern – disputed obligations, slow disclosure, someone else left holding the cost – is the same one now forming around Rotorua.

The commercial risk is already here

This is where it stops being an environmental story and becomes a business one. Tourism operators cannot honestly tell customers that part of the lake is safe. Food businesses relying on lake harvesting carry reputational exposure. Property owners have no clarity on where liability sits. And standard cover almost certainly will not help.

In June 2026, Insurance Business reported that property and general liability policies increasingly exclude pollution, asbestos and PFAS. Anthony Saunders of Gow-Gates Insurance Australasia advised businesses to “start with the assumption that it is not covered” for any pollution liability. The scale of the downside is not theoretical either: New Zealand agreed a $25 million redress deal in 2024 for PFAS-contaminated land near Blenheim, and Australia paid out more than $400 million to claimants near contaminated defence bases.

What happens next

Rotorua’s councils have form for inter-agency deadlock, having previously been at loggerheads over the Ohau channel diversion wall while operators bore the fallout. The PFAS question follows the same script. Until one agency owns the bioaccumulation assessment and its cost, the uncertainty flows downhill to the businesses and landowners who never used the foam. Australia spent $400 million learning that unresolved PFAS liability does not disappear, it compounds. New Zealand’s version of that bill is being written now, and at Tuesday’s meeting nobody would pick up the pen.

Sources

• Forever chemicals found to be reaching Lake Rotorua, calls for urgent PFAS testing (2026-08-21)
• Toxic Whenua: How PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ spread from Base Ohakea into Maori land and water (2026-07-15)
• Environmental liability: The risk hiding in property accounts (2026-06-25)
• $25m Te Tiriti redress deal agreed for contaminated Blenheim land (2024-11-06)
• PFAS are forever – a complicated chemical family (2023-09-08)
• Toxic foam: Defence Force fails to inform regional council (2018-06-01)
• Rotorua district and regional councils at loggerheads over Ohau channel
• How many ‘forever chemicals’ are actually in NZ’s water
• PFAS investigation, response and funding guidance