Emergency water main repairs to top $1 million
Emergency repairs to water supplies serving three Taupō lakeside settlements will cost more than $1 million and will be paid for by loans.
The Taupō District Council approved the “unbudgeted water expenditure” at a meeting after repeated failures of the pipeline supplying water to homes in Omori, Pukawa and Kuratau.
According to the council’s water asset manager Tom Swindells, the failures have caused “extended loss of water supply” to homes in the three settlements and while work to upgrade water supplies was scheduled for 2026, the project had to be brought forward for “immediate delivery”.
He said in the past 12 months there had been four failures of the rising main network which services 1200 properties in the south west of Lake Taupō.
Swindells said a water main failure in December resulted in a boil water notice for the three townships and repeated pipeline failures in March resulted in loss of supply to large areas of the community.
“As well as the supply disruption, each failure event poses a contamination risk.”
He said failures had generally been located on a PVC pipeline installed in 1997.
The resolution time varies in each case and for different customers but generally, each failure has taken up to 12 hours to fully resolve.
This is partly due to Omori being an outlying settlement - it takes some time to get the appropriate resources to the site, but also the challenging nature of many of the bursts.”
He said PVC pipelines could normally be expected to have lifetimes in the order of 100 years.
“However, where pipelines are subject to repeated stress events, such as those that can occur during pumping operations, expected lifetimes can be considerably reduced.
“The Omori water treatment plant pumps operated for many years in a manner that caused high pressure surge and resulting stress on the network pipelines.”
Swindells said the expected cost of the project would be $1,006,250 (incl GST) and because no money was budgeted for the project, “the expenditure will need to be loan funded”.
He said two tenders for the construction of a new rising water main from the Omori water treatment plant to local reservoirs and the installation of a burst control valve were received.
Swindells recommend Hamilton-based civil engineers Civtec carry out the repairs over the next three months.
“It is considered appropriate that council make a decision given the project is urgently required to ensure security of water supply, is of high importance to the community and has minimal impacts to any external parties as the work is within the road reserve.”