Pressure on in the West

The pressure’s mounting on the Far North District Council’s smaller water supply systems at Rawene and Opononi/Omapere as the Far North’s unrelenting dry weather continues.

Water tankers are the only back-up for these communities, which are reliant on small and rapidly dwindling streams – the Petaka in Rawene and the Waiotemarama in Opononi/Omapere.

Assets and Infrastructure General Manager David Penny says the council will do what it has to do to keep the water running in the communities but the challenges are increasing daily.

“We can get the water in, but it is an expensive prospect with set-up costs of $20,000 for equipment including tanks and pumps, and tankering costs of around $3000 per day in each of the two water reticulation areas,” he said.

“A complication is that we don’t know how many days’ supply is left in the streams so we have no way of knowing when ‘D Day’ may arrive.

“This situation is unprecedented for us and it’s hard to know what lies ahead. There is no reliable information about stream recession rates and we are getting to the stage where people can’t remember when the river and stream levels were as low as they are now, so it’s harder to tap into local knowledge to help us out.”

The council has restricted water pressure and introduced prohibited water uses, such as waterblasting, using hoses and hose attachments and filling pools and spa pools,

in the two communities and also in Kaikohe, Kaitaia, Kawakawa and Moerewa. High water users are being asked to make more savings in all these places.

The water conservation effort is going well in most of the communities with only Omapere and Opononi and Kaikohe lagging behind in terms of meeting a 20% reduction target. Kaikohe is the latest town to come on to the restricted water use list and has not yet made the savings expected of it although the water use is slowly trending down.

“The situation is worsening every day we don’t have rain,” Mr Penny said. “A lot of work is going into contingency planning for all the communities on short supply and we are restricting water use wherever we can.

“We are accelerating our effort wherever possible but the fact is that if it doesn’t rain for another three weeks’ or so, we are going to be faced with a grim situation with a serious water shortage caused by the drought and very little we can draw on.”

Mr Penny noted that other parts of Northland and New Zealand were now also facing water restrictions and drought conditions including, for example, Whangarei District and the Waikato