Water crisis after blowout

RICHARD WOODD richard.woodd@tnl.co.nz - Taranaki Tuesday, 12 June 2007

Hawera and its surrounding communities are on emergency water supplies after a major blowout in the supply line from the Kapuni Stream intake.
Contractors and South Taranaki District Council engineers were working frantically last night to get a secondary intake working.
They estimate a limited flow will be running by mid-afternoon today but it will take a week to refill the reservoirs that supply treated water to Hawera, Ohawe Beach, Okaiawa and Normanby. The blowout was discovered about 5.30pm on Sunday and nothing could be done to stop the main Skeet Rd reservoir running dry. The two town reservoirs together contain the equivalent of only half a day's storage. The limited supply is on gravity feed only.
Council staff phoned all major water users, including schools and hospitals, and asked them to reduce water consumption to a minimum until further notice. Radio broadcasts asked householders to delay washing clothes, reduce toilet flushing and only shower or bathe if absolutely necessary.
At Okaiawa and Normanby, where water pressure at the extremities of the system plummeted to zero, the council has parked Fonterra tankers filled with Eltham water for people to help themselves.
With no toilet flushing or washing water available, Normanby Primary School decided to close about 1pm and will not reopen today.
The blowout occurred in a 100-year-old, kilometre-long tunnel, which delivers water from the stream intake structure to a treatment plant and water goes from there into three reservoirs. All these structures are dotted around the Kapuni natural gas plant.
STDC's water supply manager Peter Cook says a high flow at the weekend broke through a poorly reinforced access door, allowing the entire flow to escape out a side tunnel back into the stream.
"Getting the tunnel back into service is a major job in a difficult location, involving heavy machinery. With a crisis on our hands, we decided to desilt the back-up intake and that has involved bringing in a diver to air-blow sand from the chamber and then blow debris from the supply line to the treatment plant. We hope to have a reasonable flow going by mid-afternoon, provided there are no unforeseen snags, but it will take us a week to fully recover our storage."
In addition, a newly bored well next to the reservoir delivering 20 litres per second was yesterday brought on stream earlier than planned.
The council has this year drilled seven wildcat bores and this was one of only two that produced.
High-capacity pumps are also sucking water from the Kapuni Stream, but Mr Cook says that these measures will barely meet even reduced drawoff from the reservoir. "So it's critical that everyone on the supply network uses water only for essential purposes."
The council has plans to bypass the tunnel with a new streamside intake and pipeline.