Wellington Water off the hook for performance targets

In December a wastewater tunnel collapsed in the Wellington CBD, spewing up to a thousand litres of waste a second into the capital's harbour. Photo / Georgina Campbell

Wellington Water is off the hook for its latest round of performance targets, despite its woeful track record of taking almost three weeks to attend leaky pipe callouts when it should have been taking less than two days.

Meanwhile, the water company has conceded it is unable to fully account for the condition of its critical assets across the network meaning more of them could "fail without warning".

In December a wastewater tunnel collapsed in the CBD spewing up to a thousand litres of waste a second into the harbour. This was followed by the failure of two sludge pipes underneath Mt Albert resulting in an $11m trucking operation.

Wellington Water was in the middle of fixing these two major failures when the country went into lockdown on March 25.

The city council suspended three waters performance reporting in its latest Quarter Three report to allow the water company to focus on delivering operational support to critical functions during lockdown.

Except the Quarter Three reporting period, from January to the end of March, only includes six days of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Wellington Water's performance has been in the spotlight after the previous two quarters revealed it was missing some targets by a country mile.

For example, the average response time for attendance to non-urgent callouts took almost three weeks when it should only take 36 hours.

The resolution time took just as long, falling well short of the five day target.

Three waters portfolio leader councillor Sean Rush said the Quarter Three targets were suspended because they would have needed to be compiled during lockdown.

Rush said the council was prepared to take Wellington Water's performance "as read" allowing the company to focus on operations in lockdown.

Three waters portfolio leader councillor Sean Rush says Wellington Water deserves a medal for the way it operated under crisis conditions. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Wellington Water gave a weekly update of activities and progress on big projects during that time, Rush said.

"They are an exemplar to how to operate under crisis conditions. I am very proud of them all and thank them on behalf of all Wellingtonians."

Wellington Water duplicated the number of frontline staff undertaking critical work as well as those backing them up in the office to ensure services could continue in the case of community transmission.

That meant they could also make in-roads into a backlog of service requests from a change in contractor, which has previously been partly blamed for its tardy performance.

Wellington Water said in a statement to the Herald that the reduced back-log put the organisation is a good position to meet performance targets going forward.

"While formal reporting was suspended during lockdown, we were proactively communicating with all our shareholder councils throughout, and expect to see improvements reflected in future quarterly reporting."

Max Vollenbroich of German firm Amex-Sanivar helping to guide through a high-strength liner to fix one of the broken sludge pipes underneath Mt Albert. Photo / Supplied

In its most recent company update report, Wellington Water said it has told local councils that its programme of asset inspections and condition assessments has been historically low and under pressure as budgets feel the pinch.

"This means we are unable to fully account for the condition of our high and very high critical assets at a network level.

"The consequence of this is that there could be further assets that could fail without warning. The costs of dealing with these failures are significant and in general councils do not hold the contingency for such events", the report said.

Wellington and Hutt city councils have approved more money for Wellington Water to inspect and assess the condition of all very high criticality assets over the next financial year.

Upper Hutt and Porirua city councils were still assessing their budgets to see whether expenditure could be re-prioritised to achieve the same result.

Wellington mayor Andy Foster recently said there was a clear message coming through for transparency and openness about the state of water assets.

He noted councillors also have substantial financial pressures to deal with.

"Investing in the three waters is undoubtedly going to be a priority. However there will also be decisions about service levels and priorities even within the three waters and improvements will be progressive."