Piopio's high water consumption has been apparent for some time.
LEAKS in Piopio’s water supply have been an issue for some time, ward councillor Gavin Todd was told when he queried at a recent audit and risk committee meeting how it had suddenly reached the stage of there being a lot of leaks.
Piopio is currently on level three water restrictions while the rest of Waitomo district is on level one restrictions.
In her report on the council key performance indicators for the year ending December 31, strategy and policy manager Charmaine Ellery said the water KPI was off-track for high average consumption.
The Piopio leak detection programme found leaks in Piopio to be repaired.
She said high consumption overall was because of high consumption in Te Kūiti (average 490 litres per person/per day) and very high consumption in Piopio (average 670l per person/per day).
Chief executive Ben Smit said there had been high water consumption at Piopio for some time and various things had been looked into to try and find out where the water was going.
“There’s still, I guess, some unknown consumption, but certainly the leak detection programme did make a dent in some of that usage,” he said.
“But the actual impact of that, we won’t know until we get the next round of figures.”
The leak detection was recent, but the problem with Piopio’s unknown consumption had been apparent for some time.
Ben said they had found a number of leaks but when one was plugged, it effectively pressurised the other leaks and they became worse.
Some leaks were hard to find.
“If they are low, they go straight to ground.
“You don’t have the nice green grass on top of it like you do with a low-level leak, so they are really difficult to find.
“Solid efforts have been put into it, but it’s high in time.”
Independent chair Bruce Robertson asked whether the council had been keeping up with its water pipe renewal programme, and was assured that it had.
Charmaine said the council did amalgamate water spending over three years.
“Because individual years, by the time we got contractors on site and design work done, it ate up all that money.
“So, we did amalgamate those into three-year blocks, but you still had to unpack the year before.
“There was a bit of a switch in that timing and the way that programme ran, and then of course on what works needed to be done. Though we would love to do the whole lot at once…”
Ben said there was no indication the timing change was an issue.
The council was in the process of installing more meters and valves so they could further isolate the high usage.
