Wellington’s water crisis: How did we end up in this mess?

Saturday, 27 January 2024

**Post reporters Nicholas Boyack and Erin Gourley take a look at why the region is on the brink of running out of water. They suggest that numerous factors have contributed to the current crisis, including a lack of investment and the *Kaikōura* earthquake.**

Jenny Brash is a rare find amongst former local government politicians. The former Porirua mayor not only accepts she played a role in the city’s on-going water crisis but is happy to talk about it.

Brash held the mayoral chains from 1998 to 2010 and says a former chief executive had not believed in using deprecation to help fund infrastructure and replace pipes.

Towards the end of her mayoralty, she was approached by an officer, who said ‘we have a problem with our pipes’ but by then it was too late.

She had been aware of the situation when she became mayor, the council’s focus was very much on Transmission Gully. When she finally began looking at the pipes, the horse had bolted.

Porirua’s next mayor, Nick Leggett, made the necessary changes (using deprecation to fund help fund infrastructure) but the current mayor, Anita Baker, says the city now faces unaffordable bills to renew pipes.

So how has the region found itself in a situation where it needs to spend $30 billion over the next 30 years to bring water infrastructure up to scratch and avoid running out of drinking water every summer?

In Wellington City’s case the first reason is simple, no-one was thinking about it. Pipes were not a prominent issue until a critical pipe on Willis St burst in December 2019, sending millions of litres of sewage into the harbour.

Earlier that year, then mayor Andy Foster had made no mention of the pipes during his campaign for the mayoralty; nor did his rival Justin Lester.

With no-swim orders at the city’s beaches, quickly followed by more pipes bursting around the city, the problem had suddenly become visible. Foster launched a Mayoral Taskforce in 2020 to consider how the pipes had been left to deteriorate.

The key finding was that while rates had been collected to cover the deterioration of the pipes (depreciation), a maximum of 60% of that funding was going back into the pipes as an investment. The savings were not ring-fenced for water and instead went to fund other projects.

“Collectively this adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars of underinvestment,” the taskforce report found.

Looking back, it seems obvious that councils should have been preparing to fund replacements by setting aside money for the pipes, which were slowly and quietly breaking down.

It wasn’t. 1996 was the first time that councils were even required to cover the depreciation of their assets. By that point, some of Wellington’s pipes were 100 years old.

Three years after the new requirement to fund depreciation came in, the auditor-general noted councils were still grappling with how to apply the new requirements and were questioning why they would need such large cash reserves.

As well as not fully funding depreciation, Wellington City Council decided to “sweat the assets” by running pipes as long as possible until they broke. Around the same time, it reduced its spend on checking the condition of pipes.

The taskforce found that one of these strategies might have been reasonable as a cost-saving measure, but taken together, they meant the council was significantly underfunding the pipes.

In a footnote, the report noted the problem was hard to grasp from the perspective of councillors. “The compounding effect of these decisions does not appear to have been easily visible to councillors.'

Ask any of the region’s current or past politicians and they will say the problem is lack of investment in infrastructure, which raises the question why did our politicians ignore the issue?

Hutt City policy adviser Bruce Hodgins has worked for council for 40 years and says his council only really became aware of the situation after the appointment of new chief executive Jo Miller in 2019.

Miller invited Wellington Water to provide “free and frank advice” and over the past five years that was what it had done.

“Prior to that senior officers would say this is how much we have to spend and you tell us your priorities,” Hodgins said.

Since Miller’s appointment it had become much clearer where the council needs to invest in water infrastructure.

“The councillors now make the call on what they are willing to spend,” said Hodgins.

Although giving councillors control over the purse strings sounds like a good idea, they are of course, elected officials.

Brash warns that is a big part of the problem. There is nothing very sexy about pipes and with insight from her more than 40 years in local government, she warns that politicians tend to vote for what will get them elected.

“The key issue is that pipes do not vote. They are underground and no-one notices until they leak.”

Although fixing leaks attracts plenty of attention on social media and amongst politicians, sitting alongside leaks as a contributing factor to the current current crisis is the need to increase storage.

Regionally the Wellington region relies rely on two storage lakes in Te Marua but even without the leaks, it is becoming increasingly obvious they are inadequate.

Regionally, the population is expected to increase by 150,000 over the next 30 years, requiring a massive investment in water infrastructure. Wellington Water recently warned, however, that it would cost billions to build new infrastructure and without it, there could be a halt to building new houses.

Greater Wellington chair Daran Ponter has warned that his council would not invest in new storage lakes unless the four metropolitan councils agreed to water meters.

In the early to mid 2000s, much of the focus turned to increasing water storage.

That was largely due to the view that leaks were under control and that personal water use was reducing. That eventually led to the view that more storage was not a priority.

A 2011 report from the regional council, in support of increasing the amount of water it was taking from Te Awakairangi/Hutt River said leaks had been decreasing since 2006 with Wellington City losing 15.7% of its water, Upper Hutt 11% and Lower Hutt 12.5%.

In December 2012, Stuff reported that the regional council saw no need to hurry along extra storage, which would have cost more than $170m.

At the time, council water supply, parks and reserves manager Murray Kennedy told councillors that efforts to stop leaks and people's economic water use had lessened demand to the extent that a new dam may not be needed for another 20 years, if at all.

He could not have been more wrong.

In 2008 Wellington city had ramped up its leak-fixing programme after discovering that 20% of drinking water was being lost through old pipes.

According to numbers provided to the council by Capacity (which later became Wellington Water), leaking water had dropped to just 11.3% by 2013.

But somehow, a decade later, leaks have leapt back up to more than 40% of the water supply.

Much of the recent angst over the state of our water network has focused on how much water is being lost via leaks. There are currently more than 3000 leaks waiting to be fixed across the region.

Anecdotally one of the contributing factors has been the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake.

Simon Woolf, a Wellington City councillor when the earthquake struck, is in no doubt that it is an often overlooked factor in explaining the rise in leaks.

“That earthquake should've been called The Kaikōura Wellington earthquake, as it caused significant damage to our cities already brittle underground infrastructure.”

The impact on underground services was not understood at the time.

“Knowing what I know now, Wellington should've announced a state of emergency, as the city would then have gained government assistance. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

When The Post rang a number of plumbers, there was agreement that the number of leaks on private properties increased after the big shake.

Anthony Eden of Central Plumbing Ltd said there was significant ground movement and there was no doubt that it impacted on underground services.

“As soon as we had the earthquake, we were out fixing a lot more drains.”

Hodgins says that he raised the matter with former Wellington Water boss Colin Crampton and is in no doubt the earthquake was more damaging than first realised.

“It shook the ground to the point that there are now more leaks.”