Council’s systems fail under pressure

Conversations are going on in city hall today after both Papamoa's water supply, and the city council 24/7 call centre failed last night.

The water shut off about 10.30pm and wasn't fully restored until 6am. When all of Papamoa tried to phone the council about it, the phone system failed its biggest test since going 24/7 in November 2014.


Thousands of Papamoa homes were without water overnight.

'There was some sort of overloading issue with the call centre from the number of people that were phoning in,” says council communications advisor Marcel Currin.

'The call centre team are de-briefing to address that.

'Peter Bahrs, the water supply manager said that's the largest scale outage he's seen since he's been working here. Any call system may have struggled under that many people that late at night phoning in. It was certainly a very rigorous test.”

When the council opened the call centre last November it stated there would be two night operators until about 8pm, with one operator on after that. There were processes in place to bring in back up staff if required, said council staff at the time.

The call centre successfully weathered Cyclone Pam and the tornado in May, says Marcel.

'This was all of Papamoa without water, that's many thousands of homes. We need to have some conversations about how you escalate, upscale if it's that big. So that's what they are talking about this morning.”

Marcel had no answer to a resident's concerns about the lack of water for firefighting, and the fire service not having after hours numbers for the required council staff.

Francis Jackson found there was no water at 10.30pm, the neighbour was also waterless.

He checked for any Council Shutdowns on website, and none were listed. He tried to phone the council but after an hour the phone went dead. Tried to email the council and received a reply at 6.06am Wednesday.

He then phone the council's contractor City Care in Christchurch.

'City care said; ‘We have had a lot of calls from people in Tauranga about this situation. We are trying to contact somebody in council but we are having the same problem. We've already tried three times'.”

Francis then called the fire service to let them know there was no water in Papamoa, and to bring a tanker if there were any fire calls.

'The chief at Tauranga last night said we have got nobody listed to contact for emergencies such as a hydrant,” says Francis.

The Tauranga fire station also received a number of calls from people warning there was no water in Papamoa.

The Tauranga station officer was going to phone through to N.Z. Fire Service Communications in Auckland to see if they had been supplied with Tauranga City Council emergency water staff contact numbers, says Francis.

'Due to what happened last night affecting thousands in Papamoa it appears that Council should urgently address this afterhours emergency contacts in case of another emergency and have another back up system in place.”

Marcel says that under normal circumstances council water staff and the fire service talk ‘pretty closely'.

'There's definitely contact between Tauranga City Council and the fire service regarding water supply,” says Marcel.

At 2pm today Council staff contacted SunLive to say they have since learned there was a technical fault with the council's phone system last night that was unrelated to the water issue phone calls and was not a case of the 24/7 call centre being over capacity.

You may also like....

7 comments

What fools!!!

Posted on 01-07-2015 16:29 | By sambo's back

a technical fault???? good work Marcel, how much do we pay you for that pearl of wisdom!!!!, so on that brilliant analysis, we need some sort of breakdown in our infrastructure to check that the systems work, this is the sort of thinking that will enable us to whistle up a tsunami to check out warning sirens, ooops so sorry we dont have that one covered either, I for on do not pay my rates for "feeling the love" projects like cycle ways or a waterfront menagerie, I pay them for core infrastructure and warning systems to work!!!!, a very poor response again by TCC, very similar to the Regional Councils tardy response and media releases to the public re. the Mobil oil spill recently, public relations are exactly that, figure that one out Marcel.


City Care??

Posted on 01-07-2015 19:00 | By Bronzewing

I understood that City Care lost the maintenance contract to Downer a while ago. Why is Marcel calling the wrong contractor. For a communication wally, surely this is an epic fail.


Rates cover nothing like essential services

Posted on 01-07-2015 20:10 | By ROCCO

Everything fails with this TCC outfit sooner or later it's just an accident looking for a place to happen.


What is Councils' CORE BUSINESS??

Posted on 01-07-2015 21:09 | By How about this view!

Maybe we can set up a research project to investigate and report back to Council??


Epic Fail

Posted on 02-07-2015 08:39 | By The author of this comment has been removed.

nIf this is a small example of TCC's competence in a smallish problem, then how will they cope with a major e.g. earthquake? To blame the phone system is ridiculous - this is a classic fail, but sadly nobody is found lacking and is fired. Another coverup like the mouldy building problem as to which council is extremely silent about!


Don't blame Marcel.

Posted on 02-07-2015 12:39 | By morepork

He's doing his job. What we SHOULD be asking is what backup systems are in place for eventualities like this. We have all become so used to personal communications just working we may have overlooked what happens when they don't. In the "old days" Civil Defence used a network of Radio Hams and CB radio people to provide essential communication for essential services in the event of the phone network going down. Maybe this needs to be reviewed with operators agreeing to be contactable and to relay messages in the event of civil emergency. It doesn't excuse key people at TCC not being available outside working hours, but you can assign blame after the event. The essential services need to have information in an emergency and that cannot be dependent on the phone network (cellphone or landline). Every fire/ambulance/police station should have a satellite phone and a cb radio.


@morepork,

Posted on 02-07-2015 18:16 | By sambo's back

why cannot I blame Marcel?, you his caregiver or something?, we pay his wages, and he is in a "white collar" position, and supposedly "degreed" up the "wazooo", so why not?, pretty typical that no real report has been released yet from his masters to him to the public.


Leave a Comment


You must be logged in to make a comment.