It always seems to happen. First the triplet councils (Waikato, Waipa and Hamilton) ask us to save water as part of their ‘Smart Water’ campaign. A week or so later we get a downpour. This time it was the sixteen mm of rain dumped on Raglan from 8pm on New Year’s Eve till the early hours of New Year’s Day.
The media release about saving water, issued by the triplets, didn’t really seem to cover the Raglan situation so we asked the Waikato Council about it. Their response is listed below. It seems from their response that there is no immediate need for Raglanders to save water. Using less water will lower Council costs and use less electricity to pump the water to us, so it will use less of Gaia’s resources and that’s always good.
I do question though the likely impact of the triplets ‘crying wolf’ about saving water, on the community’s response in future when a water saving is really needed in a drought.
We asked the Waikato Council:
Raglan water supply comes from artesian springs and there is no storage. Please explain how conserving water now will delay moving to Level 1?
Their response was:
Raglan is not experiencing a demand that can’t currently be met by the springs and at this stage we are able to keep the sub-region on no water alert level. However, this is not the message we need to deliver to our communities.
Council’s first priority is to educate the community on how they can better manage water use for their immediate and long-term needs. Raglan’s water use records show that consumption picks up over the holiday period as the area sees a large increase in visitor numbers.
It’s always important that we manage this precious resource and encourage our communities to be smart about water use.
The Smart Water initiative is a district wide campaign and looks at water use from across the district and from all our water sources. Working together has benefits of increased consistency of the message. We realise each area has different water sources and different constraint as the summer season progresses, but in general promoting a message of water conservation will serve the whole community.
There is a cost to each litre that is treated for use and was waste water, so even when we don’t have a water alert level in place it’s important to keep a message of careful use at the front of mind for the community.
Water alert levels are a very effective way of ensuring demand does not exceed supply across the district, by encouraging small changes now we can be confident that our communities will have initiated these changes when they are needed the most.