Why do we have a crisis?

“Lack of rain,” said Margaret Devlin when the Herald talked to her this week. She’s the chair of Watercare, the council-controlled organisation (CCO) charged with managing Auckland’s water supply and planning for the city’s future needs.

Devlin is right, in the obvious way. According to NIWA, we’ve just had the longest spell of dry weather ever recorded in Auckland: 78 days with less than 1mm of rain, from January 20 to April 6. The two neighbouring parts of the country, Waikato and the Far North, came close to the same record.

Watercare stores close to two-thirds of its water in reservoirs, or dams. A small amount comes from underground sources (aquifers) and the remaining third comes from the Waikato River. Currently, the dams are 43 per cent full. At this time of year, they should be at 77 per cent.

To get them back to the “normal” level, Watercare chief executive Raveen Jaduram said in early May, would take “consistent rainfall over many months”.

Occasional downpours won’t do it. Remember the heavy rain in the first weekend of May? It raised the storage level by only 0.7 per cent.

Intermittent showers won’t do it either. “The impact of drought can extend for some time after it [the lack of rain] ends,” NIWA meteorologist Ben Noll told the Herald. “This would be the case currently in Auckland with abnormally dry conditions persisting deep into autumn.”

But is lack of rain the true cause of the crisis? Haven’t drought conditions like this been predicted for some time?

Margaret Devlin: “I don’t agree it was predictable.”

Auckland mayor Phil Goff has backed her up. “Climate change experts have warned that more extreme conditions will result from global heating,” he said in written comments this week, “and we have been put on notice. The severity of this drought, however, is not something that Watercare or anybody else predicted.”

“Or anybody else”? Haven’t government scientists and a chorus of other voices been warning us for years?

Noll’s colleague, climate scientist Petra Pearce, says on the Niwa website that this year’s drought highlights the projections from Niwa’s regional climate modelling, which shows northern and eastern areas of New Zealand becoming more drought-prone.

Back to Devlin. Was she saying Watercare has not predicted severe weather conditions related to the climate crisis?

“I’m not saying we don’t take it into account. Watercare has looked at and does continue to look at climate change and its impact on our resources. What I am saying is that the severity of this drought was not predictable.”

Chris Darby, chair of the Auckland Council’s planning committee, disputes that. “On the back of Tasman Tempest (2017), late autumn/early winter drought/low rainfall (2019), and Niwa modelling telling us to prepare for unseasonal droughts, we should have been better informed and better prepared.”

In his view, the council has to “take responsibility for our lack of oversight of Watercare”.

The feedback loop

Droughts and water shortages operate in a feedback loop. The lack of rain means agriculture and horticulture both require more water from other sources, as do communities that rely directly on rainwater.

Watercare tankers have delivered unprecedented quantities of water to customers during this drought.

And everyone uses more water when it’s hot, as it was through the long summer just past. More showers, more drinks, more water on the garden, more kids playing in the hoses and sprinklers.

The weather report

It’s not easy, predicting the weather. In December 2018, four times more rain fell in Auckland than is usual. So are our Decembers getting wetter? No. In December just a year later, the city got a third less rain than usual.

Last winter was very wet: 28 days of rain in July, 29 in August, September was hardly any better. It just never stopped.

But then the Big Dry started. For seven straight months, starting in October, rainfall was well below the monthly average. Perhaps the wet winter before meant no one was paying much attention to spring, but by January, four months in, the likelihood of a drought should have been very clear. Rainfall that month fell to just 11 per cent of the norm.

By the end of January the news was full of stories about drought. Yet Watercare did not ask the public to restrict its water use. That took until the middle of May.

In retrospect, does Margaret Devlin think the call for restraint should have been made much earlier?

She declined to answer. She said, “Our focus is on how we cope going forward.”

It’s not the RMA

But is the RMA to blame? In 2017, Watercare applied to take a further 25 MLD from the Waikato, bringing the daily allowable limit to 175 MLD. This application was granted.

It did not go into the deferral queue, because it applied to water taken only “when the flow is above its annual median level”. That basically means May-September.

Trouble is, although that application was granted three years ago, Watercare is still not taking the extra 25 MLD. It can’t, because its Waikato Water Treatment Plant at Tuakau doesn’t have the capacity.

Expansion work did not begin until April this year and is not due for completion until August. Raveen Jaduram told the Herald there had been no reason to build it earlier.

This has implications for the 200 MLD application too. If the RMA disappeared tomorrow and Watercare was suddenly allowed to take that extra water, it couldn’t. There is no treatment capacity for it.

It’s also the RMA

Still, there are problems with the RMA. Every Government this century has wanted to improve the act, and yet found it extremely difficult to gain a working consensus on how to do that.

Goff called the process with the deferral queue “unacceptable”. He said, “I have written to the Minister for the Environment on several occasions and phoned him about this. He is aware and sympathetic to our position and is considering whether changes can be made to the act.”

The Minister for the Environment, David Parker, responded that Goff had written to him about it twice, and yes, he agrees there is an issue.

“It’s part of a wider malaise. The process takes too long, costs too much and doesn’t protect the environment.”

Parker has the RMA under review, in a process led by former Court of Appeal judge Tony Randerson, and the report is due before the election.

But, he added: “Auckland’s problem right now is not caused by resource consent issues.” Changes to the act “actually wouldn’t fix the problem”.

He said he has committed to “seeing what I can do to get the 25 million litres a day available for use in summer”. He didn’t say how he might be able to do that.

Parker also said he understood the 200 MLD Auckland wants for its long-term plans would lower the water level by only 2-6 cm. “It’s not a lot. That should be manageable.”

Is there a Plan B?

Watercare has taken some immediate steps to increase supply. A dam in Papakura and a bore in Pukekohe are being recommissioned and will add 11 MLD to the supply.

Several depots have been established around the city to provide non-potable (drinking) water for industrial use, such as in construction. But only one of them, in Penrose, is currently operating.

Watercare continues to pin its major hopes on the Waikato River: Another application was lodged just this month to take a further 100 MLD from the river. Like the 25 MLD application, it applies to times of higher flow and less demand, and will probably be heard within a couple of months.

Chris McLay at Waikato Regional Council says the 100 MLD should help Watercare to “meet demand growth in the short to medium term and, if successful, will form an enduring component of its future water supply network”.

He added that once the new consent is in place, “I understand Watercare can get under way with designing and constructing further infrastructure to be able to deliver this water to Auckland”.

Mark that. The new 100 million litres a day is not related to the current crisis. There’s no treatment capacity to turn a new consent into actual water in the taps.

That water will cover future growth, not droughts in a crisis. And, a Watercare spokesperson told the Herald, "the Waikato plant expansion will be built to accommodate population growth before it is needed."

Despite that, however, Watercare has submitted $1.350 billion worth of projects to the Infrastructure Industry Reference Group, charged by the Government with prioritising “shovel ready” projects. Among them is the Waikato treatment plant, with a price tag of $274 million. It’s been brought forward by seven years.

The new tech options

Apart from the Waikato, what are the other medium-term strategic options? Where would Margaret Devlin like Watercare to be in five years?

She mentioned “recycling and reuse” and desalination.

Goff said the same: “Other options that need to be examined include the potential for using recycled wastewater lifted to a drinkable standard, or desalination, to ensure a resilient water supply.”

Devlin wants a debate about making recycled water potable. “We have to talk about these things.”

She said there had been a lot of work overseas to show that recycled water could be made safe to drink. “We have to learn how to do things differently.”

But did she think the debate would be over whether the water was clean enough?

Wasn’t the larger question whether people would want to drink it? Not a chemical issue so much as a cultural one?

“That’s right. But it’s one of those issues that have to be looked at. We have to put together a good story to tell.”

As for desalination, she said: “It’s very expensive and it’s very energy intensive, but it is one of the options.”

Desalination plants use a process of reverse osmosis to remove salt from seawater, making it drinkable. Perth has one, supplying the city with 144 MLD of potable water and powered by a giant wind farm that generates 50 per cent more energy than the plant itself uses.

The Western Australia Water Corporation now proposes to build a second desalination plant at a cost of well over a billion dollars. As the West Australian newspaper has reported, “Water Corporation is planning ahead to secure water supplies and keep pace with climate change and projected growth.”

Could or should that be done in Auckland? There’s no plan for it.

People, eh

It’s not easy, being Watercare. People don’t want new dams, they don’t want new treatment plants and they don’t want the council to spend any money. Every initiative is met with protest. We don’t want to save water, either.

Devlin said, “I do want to thank our customers who have responded to the request for reducing their water use.”

But when the restrictions started, last Saturday , Auckland’s daily useage of 428 MLD fell only a little, to 423, before jumping, on the Monday, up to 433. The target was less than 420.

One reason for that: It was return-to-work day. Maybe people had a shorter shower that morning, but Watercare wants a 10 per cent reduction in commercial use too.

Where’s the advice on how to cut back in the office?

The business model

How did it come to this, really?

Watercare used to be the poster child of the Auckland Super City: An efficient, money-saving operation that knew how to care for its resources. Other councils and the Government looked on with admiration.

Auckland residents use less water than in other cities. It’s thought one reason for this is that we know how much we pay for water, because there’s a meter and a separate bill every month.

That’s the upside. But there’s a downside: Watercare doesn’t spend enough on resilience. It plans and operates with enough capacity to serve the general demand, but not “extreme” demand.

This model is acceptable in transport. We don’t, for example, build enough roads out of town to keep traffic flowing fast on big public holidays.

But is that acceptable for water? Is it acceptable when we know the “extremes” are becoming, as Niwa warns, “more frequent and more severe”?

Raveen Jaduram told the Herald the system is designed to manage a “1 in 200 year” drought and they are “doing everything right”.

But in the age of climate crisis that “1 in 200” concept is badly flawed, as events have repeatedly shown. Jaduram is effectively suggesting a drought of the current severity combined with a lack of stored water to cope is within the acceptable range of outcomes, because it’s incredibly rare.

That is, it’s supposed to work like this. Is Margaret Devlin embarrassed right now?
She said no. “I come back to the dry being worse than anyone ever anticipated.”

But it’s not true. We’ve been warned by experts for years about droughts this severe.
“Again, I come back to the monitoring we’ve had in place and what that tells us.”

Will the council step up?

Darby wants to go on the offensive. “We can’t let the current water crisis pass by like we did in 2017 and 2019, without resetting and creating change. It might just take turning Watercare inside out if need be, including legislative change to redirect it as a sustainable water network enabler, rather than mere provider.”

He and Goff are both keen on making it easier for people to use rainwater from their roofs, for things like watering the garden and flushing the toilet. Currently there are regulatory barriers, but the bigger barrier is Watercare itself: Letting us go off-grid, so to speak, runs completely counter to Watercare’s whole purpose, of managing and selling water to us.

At a meeting of the council’s emergency committee on May 7, Darby proposed “a joint workshop of the council’s governing body … and the Watercare board of directors to canvass the urgent need to examine a climate resilient water strategy for Auckland”. The proposal was adopted.

The council has a water strategy “in the making”, a climate action plan soon to be confirmed, and Goff has set up an independent review of the CCOs. It’s due to report on key issues this month and present its final report in July.

But will any of that make a difference? The council has had little success to date in imposing its will on the CCOs. That, from the outset in 2010, was the whole idea.

It’s the climate, stupid

The Auckland Council declared a climate emergency in June last year. Some people scoffed.

Yet within months the city had the first big evidence of what that emergency means – right now and in the years to come.

Fires ringing the cities of Australia, cyclones in the Pacific, war in northern Africa. Drought in Auckland.

The time for scoffing is over. The time for addressing all the reasons for the crisis is now. Because the first one, the lack of rain, is going to become common.

The water crisis was predictable not just because we know about the climate crisis. We also know about the city’s rapid population growth. And Watercare has always known it could not just turn to the Waikato as if it was turning on a tap.

The council and successive Governments have known all this too.

Given that mix of factors, what did they all think was going to happen?