Little help
REGION: A few spots of rain and cooler temperatures have done little to avert the likely need for a hosing ban in Palmerston North early in January.
A few spots of rain and cooler temperatures have done little to avert the likely need for a hosing ban in Palmerston North early in January.
The water level at the city’s main storage dam at Turitea, which was 2.65 metres below the spillway and only 56 per cent full a week before Christmas, is still dropping steadily.
City council treatment plants manager Mike Monaghan said the level had dropped to 3.21m by Friday.
‘‘Water use has certainly slowed down. The flurries of rain have slowed the decline, but we have had nothing significant enough to start to fill the dam.’’
Palmerston North’s last downpour was on December 20, when the Metservice recorded 34.8mm of rain. But closer to the Turitea dam catchment area, only 12mm was recorded at Ngahere Park.
Since then, there have been only light showers in the city, the most significant being a meagre 2.6mm on Boxing Day.
Showers were forecast for New Year’s Eve and Tuesday, but the cooler temperatures would recover to the mid-20s again.
Monaghan said people had generally responded well to the leveltwo water restrictions imposed in the first week of December, which was slowing the draw-down from the dam. A little rain on the garden and cooler conditions would have helped with conservation.
Before Christmas, water asset engineer Dora Luo predicted that without a sprinkler ban, and without rain, the city was on a trajectory to empty the dam by the end of February, leaving it reliant on bores that usually provided 40 per cent of the total supply.
Compliance with the hosing restrictions was expected to stretch that for two to three weeks in the absence of significant rainfall.
The lowest the dam has dropped in recent years was to more than 10m below the lip, in 2003, but that was in May, after the dam had been full at the start of January.
Luo said all the paperwork had been prepared to move urgently to level three restrictions banning almost all outdoor water use early in the New Year if that was necessary.