Eketahuna water: Community board concerned over timeframe after supply disruption

Eketahuna water treatment plant was upgraded last year.

“Could the situation have been handled better?” was the concern from members of the Eketahuna Community Board after a fault at the water treatment plant left some residents and businesses without water.

Tom McAlevey, water and wastewater operations manager at Tararua District Council, told the board investigations were still ongoing into the incident last month where the water treatment plant had shut itself off and the reservoir ran out of water.

He said the alarm system “fell over”, explaining that the system consisted of two PCs side by side, with one acting as a backup in case the other one fell over.

“The issue with what happened here was this secondary PC actually froze its screen so the operator that was on call was seeing sort of a snapshot of Friday night, for example.”

There should have been an alarm alerting them to the fact there was no communication with the server in Dannevirke, indicating there was an issue with the plant.

But that didn’t happen.

“Essentially, it’s quite a technical issue in that it’s software and hardware-based,” McAlevey said.

He told the board he’d held a workshop with all the technical experts but they couldn’t pinpoint an exact cause.

There were plans around putting in another system which was hoped would mitigate the problem.

However, board members weren’t happy as they were aware there had been calls from residents saying they had no water, but the issue wasn’t investigated for several hours.

McAlevey said the issue came to light close to midnight on the Sunday, but he wasn’t made aware of it himself until 7am the next day.

Board members felt if there had been multiple phone calls, then those monitoring the system should have checked rather than relying on what was on their computer screen.

Councillor Scott Gilmore said he was also aware that multiple calls had been received at the council.

“That didn’t action anybody going out until everything ran dry. That’s something I’m very keen to see investigated.”

Board members queried whether residents in Eketahuna could volunteer to check the reservoir if problems had been reported, to prevent issues from delays.

Councillor Mike Long said he felt there would be residents who would be quite happy to be on call to investigate.

“I know some of these plants are locked up and there’s the health and safety aspect. However, by next day ... it’s too late.”

Board member Terry Carew agreed, saying the volunteers could be given a key which they would sign for and be responsible for, however, chairman Steen McGhie felt it would be better to rely on paid staff.

Councillor Gilmore said if the technology was working, such incidents should be rare.

“If we have got our communications nailed, it should be a rare situation and a staff member can jump in the car and drive to Eketahuna.”

He said he didn’t have a problem with having a second set of eyes with someone local “but we have to make sure there’ll be really strong processes around that”.

Carew said the focus should be on fixing the system they currently had but also making sure that the backup systems in place actually worked.

McAlevey said a solution would be stress-tested and he would make sure the system was working properly before he would accept the solution.