Wellington faces highest level of water restrictions this summer

Tuesday, 12 September 2023

Two minute showers, one weekly load of laundry and no washing the car or watering the garden — this is the summer holiday facing the region.

Strict rules limiting water use are likely to come into effect over summer as Wellington balances increasing demand and dry weather.

The last two summers the region had been saved by cyclone-related rainfall, with ex-cyclone Dovi in 2022, and Hale and Gabrielle in 2023. However, the El Niño weather pattern was likely to bring drier weather this year.

All it would take was average summer rainfall for tough water restrictions to apply, said Wellington Water chief executive Tonia Haskell.

Level 4 water restrictions, the highest level available, would mean two-minute showers, one weekly load of washing per person, and a total ban on outdoor water use.

The restrictions were intended to avoid an “acute water shortage”, Haskell said.

The capacity of water storage and treatment, the leaky state of the pipes and the level of funding from councils meant Wellington Water could not lower the risk of shortages without restrictions.

Leaks are a significant reason that the region is using so much water. The region loses more drinking water through leaks than it takes from its biggest water source, Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River.

On Monday, leaders held the region’s first Water Shortage Summit to discuss how to make the water supply more sustainable.

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Sixty representatives from councils and iwi attended the summit, with the majority agreeing to three solutions recommended by Wellington Water: continued investment in fixing the pipes, smart water meters in households across the region, and a new water storage lake.

It was the first time the region had agreed on a direction to manage water loss, said Campbell Barry, mayor of Lower Hutt and chairperson of the Wellington Water Committee. It would be up to each council to allocate funding in their budgets.

Water metering was an important tool in detecting large leaks, he said, because it allowed staff to monitor spikes in water usage in real-time and detect leaks which were hidden underground.

At the moment Wellington Water was making a “real increased effort” to detect leaks, but had struggled to make a dent in the litres lost through leaks, said Barry.

Staff did not have the “intel” to know where leaks were, unless they visited the site and used sonar tools.

But water meters would take years to research and implement and cannot help this summer.

Barry said the urgency of the problem really hit home at the summit.

“The past couple of years we’ve gotten away with it because of the rainfall, but we could be in big trouble this summer,” said Barry.

Wellington Water is drawing up the emergency response plans for how it would manage and communicate drought restrictions to the public, businesses and councils.

“We can only treat and supply a certain amount of safe drinking water on any given day,” Haskell said. With an increase in leaks, the room to manoeuvre between demand for water and the amount supplied was becoming narrow.

Demand per person has been steadily increasing since 2017, bucking the overall trend of declining use over the past 32 years.

Much of the increased demand was at night-time, leading Wellington Water to conclude it was leaky pipes causing the increase rather than excessive showers.

Last week there were more than 2600 reported leaks in the region which Wellington Water had not yet fixed.

From September 24 the region will move to Level 1 water restrictions, where outdoor water use is limited to odd or even days between 6-8am and 7-9pm.

How much drinking water is being lost through leaky pipes? (Estimates provided by Wellington Water.)

Wellington: 41%

Lower Hutt: 46%

Upper Hutt: 52%

Porirua: 41%