Te Kūiti’s water plant failed last Thursday night, which resulted in two meat plants halting production and the Waitomo council issuing urgent conserve water notices.
The town relied on reservoir capacity while staff worked to located repair the problem.
Mayor John Robson said the fault was located and repaired about 2am.
“One of the issues we face in Te Kūiti is that these storage tanks do not hold much more than a day of water under normal usage,” he said.
“As a precaution, plans were made to have water tanker filling stations set up for Friday morning.”
It turned out a faulty analog card – a device within a control system that relays signals to other systems to make something operate – caused the plant to shut down.
The card was replaced and required repairs made.
“Te Kūiti’s drinking water plant is relatively new, and so the risk of serious failure is low,” Robson said.
“That is not the case for our underground drinking water network of pipes, or our reservoirs. Some infrastructure is old.
“We need to upgrade this and increase the capacity of our reservoirs to store water.”
