Is Wellington Water’s crisis strategy the right one?

Friday, 9 February 2024

Wellington Water wants people to reduce their water use as the Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River runs low over summer. Some Wellingtonians, however, are reluctant to use less water due to the high number of leaks.

If Mark Unsworth was running the messaging around Wellington’s water crisis, he would consider declaring a mea culpa.

One of Wellington’s best known public relations practitioners, he said Wellington Water was in a tricky situation.

With the region running out of water at the same time as leaks are steadily increasing, Wellington Water is front footing the issue.

Using social media, it is highlighting what it is doing to reduce leaks and is emphasising that is prioritising the leaks losing the most water.

Anecdotally, people are refusing to reduce water use due to the number of leaks across the region. There are more than 3200 leaks waiting to be fixed, many of which are long term.

Unsworth believed Wellington Water’s strategy was the right one. The only other option was to declare a mea culpa, emphasising how serious the situation was and spelling out the dire consequences of what would happen if Wellington ran out of water.

Jean Jacques Hair Design had a leak outside their building at 164 Lambton Quay and started recording how long it had leaked.

“It sounds like it is running a high quality campaign and I cannot see what else it can do.”

Director of regulatory services Charles Barker stood by its messaging and said he was “acutely aware that it’s frustrating to be asked to conserve water while there are a number of leaks” not being fixed.

Wellington Water is fixing as many leaks as it can with the available funding it gets from councils, he says.

“Our job is to make sure that we use the funding effectively – and to do that, we fix the leaks with the highest volume first. This does mean that the smaller leaks can take a long time to get fixed.”

Former Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast said that in the past, when there wasn a water shortage, residents and local government willingly worked together to significantly reduce water use.

This time, however, she could not see any leadership coming from the region’s mayors and she said people needed to understand they were paying for water in their rates.

Wellington is losing 45% of its drinking water to leaks.

If water usage continued to rise, then their rates would also rise.

Prendergast said Wellingtonians can see that local government has not done a good job looking after water infrastructure, which made it tougher for Wellington Water to get its message across.

Wellington City Mayor Tory Whanau announced this week she was replacing Tim Brown as the council representative on the Wellington Water Committee. Wellington had been the only council not represented by their mayor on the committee that oversees Wellington Water.

Wellington Water chairperson Nick Leggett noted the agency’s chief executive Tonia Haskell last week rejected a call for plumbers to be more involved in fixing leaks by saying it was not due to a lack of skilled staff but a lack of money.

Leggett understood why people were unhappy when a reported leak went unfixed for months.

“People can see all the leaks and that makes them grumpy, which is fair enough.”

However, it came down to money and Leggett believed that a lot of people did not understand that Wellington Water was funded by councils.

Nick Leggett says Wellington Water needs more money to fix more leaks.

“The reality is that we could gear up and fix more leaks but it is fundamentally a financing issue.”

The current situation reflected years of chronic underfunding and with councils under financial pressure, he said no matter how Wellington Water dressed it up, it needed more money to fix more leaks.

Barker was confident the messaging around the need to reduce water use was being heard.

“We’re heartened by the fact that we’ve held at level two water restrictions so far. Following the shift from level one to level two, we saw a drop in daily water usage from a peak of 194 million litres to around 187 million litres.”

He was hearing, on a daily basis, what households and organisations were doing to save water and there had been a good response to water tanks.

“From the outset one of our objectives was to make sure we took a ‘no surprises’ approach. It was important to us that we were clear with councils and the public that there is a significant risk this summer that the Wellington metropolitan region may face a water shortage.”

Wellington Water fixed 688 leaks in January, 50 of which were urgent. It also fixed 494 medium priority leaks, defined as losing between four and 10 litres per minute and of no risk to public safety or property.

The region's drinking water network is mostly 30 to 100 years old and made up of 2543km of pipes - the equivalent distance of flying from Wellington to Sydney. The number of leaks has been rising steadily since mid-2022.