With water restrictions expected to be lifted by the end of the week, Waitaki Mayor Gary Kircher has praised the community and Waitaki District Council staff for getting through the worst of Oamaru’s water woes at the weekend.
On Friday, the council issued an urgent notice that without full water restrictions, about 15,000 people on the Oamaru water supply stretching from Oamaru south to Moeraki could run out of treated water.
But yesterday the Oamaru treatment plant again started to outpace the demands on the water supply and the council eased the restrictions from "full" to "limited", with some day-to-day activities like washing clothes and running a dishwasher now no longer prohibited.
"We can always do things better, but I was really pleased with how it all went - 98% of it went well, and we’ll work on the rest of it," Mr Kircher said.
"At the moment there’s a lot of discussions nationally about aggregation of water supplies and various things. My biggest concern was this would be used as a reason for that, but actually it’s a reason not to do that.
"The problem was completely external to our system - our system was good. But if you had someone sitting in Christchurch making the decisions, there’s no way that they could have responded in the way our team was able to get the message out there on Friday to conserve water. And that’s a testament to our system versus this theory of some big water company running our water.
"Yes, it was inconvenient, but I was optimistic that our people would pull together and we’d get through it. And that is exactly what happened, and we’re not too far off saying, ‘All right, we’re back to normal.’"
The water restrictions are expected to be lifted on Friday. Last month, a record record-breaking 217mm of rain was recorded in Oamaru, more than five times the long-term November average of 44.7mm.
It was the highest amount recorded since records began in 1941.
The soaking resulted in water three times more turbid than ever seen before arriving at the treatment plant.
Council assets group manager Neil Jorgensen said with the treatment plant now back to producing 13,000 cubic metres of water a day, though still a reduced level, "the important thing is it’s more than what we’re using on a more normal basis".
"What we actually managed to do was to continue to keep the town supplied with treated drinking water through some pretty dire conditions," he said.
The treatment plant needed two up-to-six-hour cleans of its membranes, which would again temporarily cause a drop in the production of treated water, but then the plant would be able to produce treated water at a normal capacity.
