My Christmas wish for safe water
Another drama in my old township this week. E.coli in the water and warnings everywhere to boil our water. For making you feel like you live in a third world country, there’s nothing like a water scare.
Apart from a short time during the earthquake of 2011, I can’t remember a previous drinking water problem in our Diamond Harbour area, which shows either how good our water is, or, more likely, how we haven’t realised what we’ve been drinking.
By the time a bug is detected it might already be too late which would explain my squiffy digestive system this week.
E.coli, most strains of which live in healthy humans and animals, can cause severe illness including bloody diarrhoea and stomach cramps.
So just what you need before Christmas. For someone who intends to over-eat and over-drink their way through the festive season, dodgy water is very bad news and brings up visions of making more trips to the toilet than to the buffet.
In truth boiling your drinking is not exactly a great inconvenience although it’s easy to forget and a pain when brushing your teeth.
Our local scare highlights how much we take a basic service like safe drinking water for granted. Diamond Harbour gets its water from a bore on the other side of Lyttelton Harbour with the water pumped to local reservoirs via a submarine pipeline. We like to skite, especially to visiting Aucklanders, how much better our water tastes than theirs.
Given the prevalence of boresupplied water and the fact New Zealand is very much a farming country, it’s surprising water alarms are not more widespread.
If authorities are becoming more vigilant (there is some doubt about this), we can thank the people of Havelock North who weathered a horrendous water crisis last year when camplobacter got into their drinking water.
It was, in some ways, easy to dismiss this story as something happening to other people in a place far away. We need to be reminded that 5500 of the town’s 14,000 residents contracted camplobacteriosis, which won’t generally kill you but anyone who has had it will attest to the wish to die once in its throes. The outbreak and its complications have been linked to four deaths in the area and 45 people became so ill they needed to be hospitalised.
Perhaps the crisis did not get quite the cut-through it deserved although it did precipitate a public inquiry into the specific cause of the gastro outbreak and a wider inquiry into safety and security of the country’s drinking water.
The root of the outbreak was found to be in ponds near the bores supplying the Havelock North reticulated system. The pond water contaminated by what was probably sheep faeces had leaked into the bores, the inquiry found.
The inquiry’s grim findings resulting from the wider inquiry were released this month and said 20 per cent of the country’s water supply affecting about 750,000 people was not demonstrably safe.
It highlighted the Ministry of Health’s lackadaisical attitude and local authorities out of their depth.
About 92,000 people were at risk of bacterial infection, 681,000 of protozoal infection and 59,000 at risk from the long term effects of exposure to chemicals through their water supply, the report said.
It recommended immediate treatment of all drinking water, much tighter monitoring and enforcement of existing legislation until new laws could be enacted and the setting up of a specific drinking water regulator.
The inquiry team was disappointed authorities had not been galvanised into action by the Havelock North disaster.
For instance, over the course of its investigation, one North Canterbury supply was contaminated immediately after chlorination had stopped from a previous contamination; near Ashburton, a council issued a boil water notice seven hours after it was told to do so, after a dispute with the DHB around whose responsibility it was; in Marton, residents complained of brown drinking water which came from old, asbestos concrete pipes.
A line from the first report on Havelock North caught my eye. It said a higher standard of care was needed when it came to drinking water ‘‘akin to that applied in the fields of medicine and aviation where the consequences of a failure could similarly be illness, injury or death.’’
Fortunately a clean reliable water reticulation system is not as complicated as a jumbo jet so the high duty of care should not be that difficult to discharge.
The risks to our tap water will increase. If local authorities and the Ministry of Health need to get one thing right, it must be the water supply. If they fail at that it seems no hope exists for cleaning up rivers and other water courses.
We like to skite to Aucklanders how much better our water tastes than theirs.