New water reservoir a key resilience project

A one-hectare section at the end of the new Otumahi Road rural subdivision near Te Teko will be the site of a reservoir to provide resilience to the Whakatāne district's bore water supply.

Whakatāne District Council has approved the purchase of land near Te Teko as a site for a $5 million water reservoir for the Otumahi water supply.

At a meeting on Friday last week, the council agreed to pay $250,000 to purchase the Paul Road property

'This is a key resilience piece of work,” Infrastructure general manager Bevan Gray told councillors at last week's meeting.

'Where you have pump stations, ideally you put in place reservoirs so that when you have power outages you have some supply for a certain quantity of time.”

He said the council's investment around the Otumahi area in terms of water supply has been ongoing for quite some time. This is the next step in building the resilience of this supply.

The one-hectare site is part of a new six-lot subdivision on Paul Road, which the council granted consent for in February 2022 with a condition that lot six be vested to the council for a reservoir.

Since 2017, a single bore on Paul Road, part of the Otumahi water supply, has provided water to Te Teko and Edgecumbe. The area was previously served by Braemar water sources, which have been found to have levels of minerals arsenic and antimony higher than allowed by New Zealand drinking water standards. Last year, a second bore at Paul Road was created and head works and treatment plant for this is expected to be completed this month.

In his report to council, Mr Gray said the planned reservoir would provide a constant head of water for the supply and also a buffer in case of any issues supplying water from the treatment plant.

'The water supply would be sufficient to supply existing customers and also to provide water to the Whakatāne scheme should this be required in the future, with the existing high lift pumps at Otumahi and no loss of pressure. This would require the town's high lift pumps to be retained to pump water to the town's reservoirs and to feed the Otarawairere reservoir, which in in turn supplies Ōhope.”

Councillor Gavin Dennis queried whether the 24-hour buffer time the report stated the reservoir would provide was up to United Nations standards, which he understood to be 48 hours.

Mr Gray said his team were still looking at options around the specifics of the reservoir design and would come back to the council with that once contractors had an opportunity to complete the full design. The issue with the size of the tank was around how big a tank could be built according to the geotech report on the land.

The reservoir project has a budget of $5,157,500 in the council's long-term plan, spread over three years. This is inclusive of a provisional $500,000 for the investigation, concept assessments, negotiations for, and completion of land purchase requirements.

Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

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1 comment

How long

Posted on 14-08-2022 18:16 | By Kancho

Will it be that Tauranga has a reservoir then . Tauranga grows and grows and we are always short of water . Guess it's easier to get in our ear about using less water than actually build resilience. No problem building a museum etc but essential water well no


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