Leaks in pipes undo water saving

Aucklanders taking quick showers while millions of litres disappear

Auckland’s drinking water pipes are leaking at least 50 million litres a day, far more than homeowners have been asked to save to help relieve the acute water shortage.

The city’s water managers don’t know how much water has leaked over the past five months — when use restrictions came in and pipes were breaking because of the ground drying out and contracting.

Aucklanders have been asked to save 30 million litres of water a day but at least 1 in every 8 litres that Auckland produces disappears from leaking pipes.

Watercare chief executive Raveen Jaduram admitted it was not even meeting its own target of water loss.

“It’s not good enough. We’re not meeting our [Statement of Intent] target of 13 per cent or less, and we’re just over that,” Jaduram said.

Torbay resident Lynda Breeze said leaks near her house had taken weeks to fix.

One was during the height of summer when there were hundreds of extra leaks because of the dry weather cracking pipes.

“[It was] quite a lot of water. I filled my bucket up, I think I estimated one minute to fill a 10-litre bucket. And that wasn’t all of it [being collected],” Breeze said.

Ten litres a minute is 14,000 litres a day, for three weeks. She and her neighbours were calling Watercare to get it fixed, but had given up by the time it was done three weeks later.

Breeze said the length of time it took to fix was frustrating and it wasn’t an isolated incident.

“One in Browns Bay was a bigger one than ours. My husband drove past one in Glenfield a week ago and someone there said it had been going for two weeks,” Breeze said.

“It’s really frustrating that at a time Watercare are talking about conserving water and that we’re in a drought, that water’s just going down the drain.”

Jaduram and board chairwoman Margaret Devlin said leakage was inevitable; it was more a question of what level was acceptable.

Jaduram said they had started a leak detection programme and over the next year council would examine

6000km of pipes, and improve response time to within five days.

“So have we put enough resources in? Well, we have now. But there are lots of other challenges in fixing leaks — identifying them is one. We are going to proactively look for leaks as well as [ones the public calls in],” Jaduram said.

“It is precious. Absolutely. And we need to do more, ” Jaduram said.

Auckland councillor Chris Darby estimated the loss was at least 50 million litres a day, and may even be as high at 70m.

“If you want to put that in perspective, Mayor [Phil] Goff went to Hamilton and secured an allocation transfer from the Hamilton City Council of

25m litres a day. So the loss through primarily leakage is exactly twice what Goff secured from Hamilton City Council,” Darby said, who is also the chair of the council’s planning committee.

Jaduram said the entire city of Dunedin used 40m litres a day.

Darby was critical of Auckland’s preparedness for this shortage.

Jaduram said the older a city was, the more it leaked.

Newer cities, ones that have been rebuilt because of war, or ones that invest heavily have far better leak rates. He promised Watercare would do better.

“There is always more we can do. We are always going to do more as Watercare, because we’re asking our consumers to do more and they’ve been doing well, and our businesses have been doing well. We need to respond as well.”

RNZ