Water back on in Reporoa

200614sp6 Water poured from tap. 20 June 2014 Daily Post photograph by Stephen Parker RGP 21Jun14 - RGP 05Aug14 - OFF: Councillors have decided not to proceed with a referendum on adding fluoride

Water supplies in Reporoa are back to normal following a system fault that reduced water flow to a trickle in some properties and resulted in the closure of two local schools.

The fault was tracked to one of two water supply sources in the rural community south of Rotorua city and was found to be an electronic hardware failure, Rotorua Lakes Council water solutions director Andy Bell said.

"There are two sources that supply the Reporoa water system - one at Deep Creek and the other a spring off State Highway 5.

Normally if there were a fault at one source, water supplies would continue from the second source.

"We are still trying to ascertain why this was not the case today - possibly due to a significant pressure drop.

"This morning's fault was found to be at Deep Creek where electronic hardware had failed."

He said due to the nature of that failure, monitoring systems which would normally send an alert, did not recognise there was a fault.

The council became aware of the problem when calls came in from Reporoa about 5.30am.

"Rotorua Contracting staff went out there immediately and by about 8.30am the system was fully operational again," Mr Bell said.

There had so far been no reported or identified issues with wastewater following the water outage, he said

"As far as we are able to ascertain - we can't be certain due to the fact no alarms were triggered - it appears the unrecorded failure occurred about 2am."

The two water sources out there supply the general Reporoa area including the village and a dairy factory which is the single biggest user in that community but was not affected by today's fault.

Earlier this morning both Reporoa Primary School and Reporoa College decided to send students home not knowing when the water supply would be back to normal.