Rain, particularly heavy rain or rain after a long dry spell, can wash dirt and other harmful stuff into our source water, rapidly changing its quality and chemistry. Smaller water sources (like the streams we take water from on Mt Te Aroha) are particularly prone to this. These rapid changes can disrupt the treatment process to the point where it is no longer effectively treating the water.

For example, water treatment plants are designed to monitor the quality of the raw water, and adapt the treatment as required (for example, adding more or less chemicals). Those changes take time to implement, which usually isn’t a problem as the changes to the raw water quality are gradual. However, if there’s a sudden and significant change to the water supply, the plant cant make its changes fast enough leading to deteriorating treated water quality, the plant then automatically shuts down to prevent further deterioration in treated water quality. This is not a design flaw – it’s an in-built protection, it stops the plant from putting poorly treated water into the town’s water supply.

As explained above, shutting down the plant when there is a sudden change in water quality isn’t a problem or design flaw – it’s a layer of protection for the town’s water supply. However, changes to the standards for drinking water in New Zealand mean we are going to be completing some signficant upgrades to our water services over the next few years. We’re working on making Te Aroha’s water supply stronger to help maintain treatment standards – even when the treatment process isn’t working at its best.

We could build bigger storage tanks – but that’s a very expensive way to make our water supply more resilient. As part of planned improvements, we are looking at alternative treatment approaches – such as adding UV treatment (an additional layer to the water treatment process). This would make the Te Aroha supply stronger to these weather events, without having to build more storage.

Te Aroha’s water comes from four sources, the Waihou river, the Tutumangao stream, the Tunakohoia stream and the Pohimihi stream. 

More information can be found at Te Aroha water supply. 

The reduce water use message is normally associated with Council’s water demand management - the normal restriction levels we use every summer. Conserve and urgently conserve is the language we use when there is some unplanned event where we need people to  save water e.g. bad weather event, unexpected issue at the water treatment plant.

We know that the differences are subtle and there is some crossover – especially when we’re dealing with severe water restrictions during events like droughts. Council is working on how we better differentiate these two language sets so that messaging is clearer in the future.

Demand for water in Te Aroha is quite high for a town of this size. There are good reasons for that - like how we supply water to support industrial businesses, who provide economic benefit to our community. However, it also means that when we have a significant outage at the treatment plant, the window to resolve the problem without disrupting our communities is very small. There are generally only a few hours to solve a problem before we look to put water restrictions in place. Once restrictions are in place we also reduce supply to non-residential users (e.g. industrial businesses).

The only way to get info was social media. One of the challenges of living in a small district with no daily papers is that it’s difficult to get urgent messages out to the community. We tend to use our website, the Antenno app and Facebook as the key channels to share this information, and we actively ask people to pass it on to others – particularly those who might not see it on digital channels. The information was also shared on Radio Te Aroha, The Breeze and was picked up by multiple other media channels.