Houghton Bay residents could have been injured by exploding water main – eyewitness

A Wellington man says reports from residents of a small river of water from a leaking water main went unheard for two weeks before it burst and sent a torrent of mud and trees onto a road below.

Two hundred homes in Houghton Bay were left without water when the water main burst on Tuesday afternoon.

Richard Cooke said someone could have died if they had been on a path to a nearby play center when the main finally gave way.

"I heard a massive bang; it sounded like, well, the hillside and trees falling. It had blown off the side of the retaining wall below where the leak was starting.

"I looked up and there were a couple of teenage girls. It looked like they had been walking on the sidewalk when it blew under them. It must have scared the hell out of them," Cooke said.

Cooke said the main had been sending "a little river" into the valley for almost a month before bursting.

"It was a decent-sized stream, enough to cause a waterfall to come down the hill and wash away a path we were walking on. We're talking 20 to 50 liters per second going down the hill."

His neighbor had reported the original failure about two weeks before the main burst and Cooke contacted the city on Monday when the pressure began to lift the pavement above the leak.

The contractors had just arrived on site when the water main suddenly burst.

"If someone had crossed that bridge, they would have been hit by, I don't know, how many tons of mud, water and trees would have been uprooted and carried down the hill. That's what really bothered me. It was so avoidable and it ended up being very dangerous," Cooke said.

He couldn't believe the leaking water main was allowed to worsen into a dangerous situation amid a water shortage, he said.

Dog walker also alerts the city council

Claudia Schötz walks her dog along the paths that run under the water collector.

He said he was aware of the leak a week before reporting it to council on Jan. 10.

Five days later, the amount of runoff had increased and she called again, this time providing GPS coordinates in case council staff had been unable to find the spot under the road.

"It had widened a lot further down the hill, by about five to ten meters wide. People with children use that path to get to the playground, so that was a cause for concern," Schötz said.

He said work on a main pressure relief valve was completed in the area just before Christmas and he suspected the pipe began leaking almost immediately afterwards.

"I just find it hard to think that the supply of drinking water and leaks is not a top priority. It is necessary to prioritize all infrastructure instead of working on other projects that are less urgent because without water we are in a real conflict," he said.

Wellington is currently in level two of water restrictions Residents are advised to conserve water and refrain from using unattended irrigation systems or sprinklers.

Water infrastructure is the top priority

The city's mayor said her council has no choice but to increase funding for the region's water provider.

The Wellington region's water problems have repeatedly hit the headlines this summer with threats of tighter water restrictions and large leaks emerging almost daily.

Wellington Water has said it needs a share of $760 million from councils in the region to repair the broken network.

Mayor Tory Whanau said Nine at noon Water infrastructure was one of the council's top priorities.

"It is receiving $110 million this financial year. When we reach our LTP [Long Term Plan] “In the next two weeks we are looking to increase our funding… We have no choice, we have to increase our funding, so I am confident it will happen.”

Whanau could not say exactly what council would need to cut to achieve that increase.

"We have asked officials to come back. Do projects need to be postponed, do rates need to be increased, or do we do nothing? So that's the kind of thing we're going to discuss on the 31st. It's going to be difficult not to." doubt, but we know the seriousness of the problem and we take it very seriously.

Meanwhile, Wellington Water said it was making progress on repairing major leaks in the region.

When asked about the leak in Houghton Bay, executive director Tonia Haskell said Nine at noon There will be an investigation into the cause.

"We're letting people get on with it and fix the job on the spot and then we'll come back and see what went wrong. Hands up, we don't always get it right. We depend on our consumers and our clients to report these things and the Houghton Bay residents have done a great job on this.

"Then we have to look at our systems, our processes and our people and see how we have been prioritizing and whether they have been given the right attention at the right time."

But he said this week that the region's water reserves were in a good position and that fixing large leaks helped avoid new restrictions.

"Every little bit helps and some of the leaks we're having are pretty big. Last night I walked past one coming out of a toby and sent it to our call center. When you're losing liters per second, every little bit helps."

Haskell said it also helped that residents were responding to the current ban on the use of outdoor sprinklers, catchment levels were high and lakes were full.