Pete Mason: up to his knees in work

Hydrologist Pete Mason has turned a taste for adventure into a working life that’s taken him from Antarctica to the South Pacific, and from Outback Australia to the Chatham Islands.

Pete Mason (centre) instructs South Pacific trainees setting up a flow-monitoring site on the Nabora River in Fiji. (Photo: SOPAC)

Sounds like you’ve been all around. How did you get started?

I began work as a hydrology cadet straight from high school, aged 17. My first posting with Ministry of Works was to the West Coast. Then I began to specialise in snow survey and glaciology in the Southern Alps and ended up making three trips to the Antarctic Dry Valleys doing hydrology and glaciology. Then I transferred to Lake Tekapo for two years, working on the Tasman Glacier and doing snow surveys in the Mackenzie Basin. I returned to the West Coast for another couple of years then took three years’ leave to do my OE. I shipped to the UK via the Panama Canal (as you did in those days), travelled around Europe, and came back overland as far as Western Australia, where I got work in the Outback doing mineral exploration in the Kimberleys for Australian Anglo American Ltd.

Eventually I returned home to carry on with my career, this time specialising in irrigation hydrology in the Canterbury area. I returned to the Christchurch hydrological field team with DSIR (later NIWA) and became Field Team Leader five years ago. Now I’m responsible for a team of three doing hydrology in the Canterbury region, including the Chatham Islands.

Tell us about your Chatham Islands work.

Well, my first trip was in 1987, when we got involved with the Liquid Fuels Trust Board. They were looking for alternative fuel sources during the oil crisis. They were investigating extracting liquid methanol from the peat reserves on the island and we had to do hydrological research on the peat basins to see if this was viable. While this didn’t eventuate at the time, our work led on to hydropower investigations and, as a consequence, I’ve now being working there for over 20 years.

For a change of scene, how about your work in the Pacific Islands?

I initiated a five-year contract through NZAID to set up a hydrological network for Rarotonga, which involved measuring water flows from the nine major streams that supply fresh water for the island. This meant building weirs to measure the flows, installing automatic rain gauges, and training up field staff. They have to keep all the recorders going and archive all the data for the engineers who were redesigning the water supply intakes. During the contract I travelled to Rarotonga every year to update the data and I still continue training the staff involved.

I’ve also had three trips to Samoa doing similar work and just recently was involved in training surface and groundwater technicians from all around the Pacific at the SOPAC offices in Suva over a three-year period. [SOPAC is the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission.]

What’s your favourite part of the job?

Fieldwork and more fieldwork. I’m so lucky being able to work in some of the best outdoor scenery anywhere in the world. I also get to drive the NIWA jet boat throughout the South Island, measuring river flows and travelling up many rivers that ordinary jet-boat drivers would never get to boat. I spent my first 20 years in the passenger’s seat and it’s only been in the last 15 that I’ve actually driven. But, my, it’s been well worth the wait, and I gained heaps of experience just by being a passenger in the early years.

I do a lot of commercial work with the jet boat, such as hydropower investigations, fish habitat studies, bird counts, low-flow and water-loss assessments, water-quality work, and tidal gauging, to name a few.

Can you describe a typical day in the field?

No two days are the same, but I’ll give it a go.

  • Bike to work (10 minutes).
  • Check telemetry for river flows. This means looking at the data that is sent automatically to the office from flow stations on various Canterbury rivers and streams.
  • Choose an appropriate river to gauge and assemble appropriate gear. Depending on the flow, this might involve the jet boat, a helicopter, manned cableway, or wading gear.
  • Load up the 4x4 wagon and drive up to the river station (chains required in winter).
  • Carry out flow-gauging in river. Could be low flow, medium flow, or the Full Monty – a river in full flood.
  • Return to base in the afternoon and prepare gear for tomorrow’s field trip.
  • Bike home and feed the dog.
  • Wife asks, “What have you been up to today?”
  • Reply, “Just the usual, dear.”

Reality: you’ve just done what hundreds of tourists have done that day, except you got paid for it!

The work of a NIWA field hydrologist combines a high level of technical expertise with a lot of in-field – or more usually ‘in-water’ – action.

Pete and his team are responsible for maintaining NIWA’s network of hydrological monitoring equipment in rivers and lakes throughout Canterbury. The sophisticated instruments they install, maintain, and use for gauging river flows deliver valuable data, often in ‘near-real time’, back to users such as Environment Canterbury, Christchurch City Council, irrigation companies, and NIWA scientists. The data are vital for environmental monitoring and forecasting,and for research – for example, into the development of flow-forecasting systems.