City’s water use spikes on hot day
Temperatures soaring above 30 degrees Celsius have highlighted how difficult Christchurch residents are finding it to conserve water.
The Christchurch City Council has asked householders and businesses to cut back on their water use to allow vital well repairs to take place.
If they don’t, the council says it may have to introduce water restrictions or take water that may need chlorination from other wells.
The council’s request appears to have largely fallen on deaf ears, if the lack of savings to date are anything to go by.
In the past 10 days, daily water use across the city has been on average about 11 per cent above the council’s target of less than 140 million litres a day.
The only exceptions were Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, when use was a few per cent lower.
On Wednesday, as the temperature hit 31C in the city, total consumption leapt to
179.542 million litres, 28 per cent higher than asked for and not far off the highest since the council campaign began, of 183.363 million on December 29.
Wednesday’s figure was the equivalent of 324 litres per person. It was 64 per cent above the use on January 1 and 79 per cent up on December 26, a week earlier.
Residents in the central water zone of the city managed to push the needle off the end of the red danger zone on the council’s ‘‘Our Water Use’’ dial.
Their consumption on Wednesday was the maximum
93 million litres, which was also reached on December 9 and 17.
The other seven water zones were all well into the heightened alert yellow segment of the dial on Wednesday.
Ferrymead, Northwest, Parklands and Rawhiti householders and businesses all used more water than on any day since November 22.
It was the highest daily consumption by those in the Riccarton and West water zones since December 17, and since December 30 in the Kainga-Brooklands zone.
Since the council’s campaign began at the start of November, the weather has been often wet with few very warm days.
In March last year, the council controversially began chlorinating Christchurch’s water after tests showed damaged well heads might contaminate water from aquifers below the city.
Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel has said the need to conserve water was purely to speed up well repairs, and not because of any water shortage.