A new waste water pipe is being trenched underneath Willis St after an old one collapsed just before Christmas. Photo / Georgina Campbell.
A new waste water pipe is being trenched underneath Willis St after an old one collapsed just before Christmas. Photo / Georgina Campbell.
Wellington Water is taking almost three weeks to attend leaky pipe callouts when it should be taking less than two days.
The latest performance targets for the organisation have been released in the midst of what some city councillors have called a "crisis".
Two major waste water pipelines have failed in as many weeks pushing Wellington Water close to full capacity. The situation has been exasperated by burst water mains, leaving some residents without water in their homes for two nights in a row.
But the organisation was failing to meet performance targets before these failures.
Wellington City Council owns the water infrastructure and gives money to Wellington Water to manage the services on its behalf.
The latest performance reporting covers the period between July and December 2019 capturing only one of the recent failures, which was the wastewater pipe that collapsed under Willis and Dixon Sts.
It shows attendance and resolution times for leaking pipes and connections callouts have got even worse than they already were.
Mayor Andy Foster said last week lower level water work would be deferred with so many serious issues to manage and limited resources. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
The council's Quarter Two report shows the median response time for attendance to these non-urgent callouts took almost three weeks when it should only take 36 hours.
The resolution time took just as long. The target is five days.
However, Wellington Water has cleaned up its act on urgent callout response times, although it has still failed to meet targets.
Urgent work covers issues like major bursts, breakages or blockages in the network.
The median response time for attendance to urgent callouts was 75 minutes, which is 15 minutes shy of the one-hour target.
The data is based off an indicative performance assessment as Wellington Water was only 70 per cent through its full performance review, a note in the report stated.
More robust reporting on these measures was expected to be in place by Quarter Three, when the true effect of Wellington's water woes on the organisation's overall performance would be made clear.
Last week mayor Andy Foster said there was limited resources to manage so many "serious issues" so lower-level work would be deferred by Wellington Water.
"While this is not ideal, we do understand the reasons for it and ask people to be patient while we resolve the underlying issues," he said.
In July last year, Wellington Water transitioned from City Care to a partnership with Fulton Hogan for maintenance across the region.
The council's Quarter Two report noted there were challenges with the transition including a backlog of work leftover from City Care.
"The new approach has also taken some time to get up to speed and there remains significant uncertainty over the accuracy of reporting of storm water and waste water blockages as well as reporting of interruptions to customers in our water network."
Wellington Water declined to comment on its latest performance target measure but a spokesman said a general briefing for media would be held early next week.
