Told to save but water flows down the drain
Residents trying to conserve water for Watercare say the council controlled organisation should ‘‘practise what it preaches’’.
Aucklanders were told to cut back on 20 litres of water a day each on March 9 after a weather event caused the Ardmore Water Treatment Plant to halve its capacity.
This has incensed residents on Lakeside Dr, Orewa who have been trying to get a burst water pipe fixed since March 3.
Following no action from their calls to the water company one resident approached the Rodney Times.
He said he was sick of Watercare’s ‘‘hypocritical’’ messages, and the water company needed to start ‘‘practising what it preaches’’. The man, who didn’t wish to identify himself, criticised Watercare for its slow response to fixing a two-week old leak during a water crisis.
Lakeside Rd resident Valerie Bell reported the leaking pipe underneath the berm outside her property on March 3. She too was unhappy two weeks later little had been done.
‘‘I got angry. It’s not on when you’re told to save a couple of buckets a day,’’ she says.
Water flowed onto Bell’s driveway, into the gutter and past five houses to a drain down the road.
Watercare communications manager Rachel Hughes chose not to answer questions on what exactly was leaking, how serious it was, how many litres of water had been lost from it, and how many other leaks across Auckland Watercare was currently dealing with.
She confirmed Watercare received a report of the leak on March 3.
‘‘We sent a crew to investigate and they logged the need for further leak detection work. Before this work could be carried out, the extreme weather event hit Auckland and more timecritical and significant jobs needed to be prioritised,’’ she said in a statement.
In another case of council complaint coincidence, three hours after receiving questions from the media workers began attending to the leak.
Three hours after that, at 8pm on Friday, it was all patched up, Bell said.
A worker had his arm in the ground right up to his shoulder to reach whatever was leaking, Bell said, and she thought most of the water had probably been flowing away beneath the ground.