Auckland’s water and wastewater services are operating normally today after yesterday’s intense deluge that caused flooding across the city.

Watercare incident controller Nigel Toms says the company’s infrastructure projects were shut down yesterday as a precaution, but will be back up and running today.

“Our teams and contractors will be carrying our safety assessments at our construction sites – including the Central Interceptor – and will be resuming work today.”

A watermain break in Warkworth late yesterday afternoon was fixed within a few hours, and did not impact customers’ water supply.

“Today our crews are focussed on cleaning up after the storm,” Toms says. “When we have intense rain like we had yesterday, a huge amount of rainwater gets into our wastewater network and causes overflows from manholes, engineered overflow structures or private gully traps.

“Water can get into our wastewater pipes in a number of ways – it can seep in through flooded manholes or through small cracks in our pipes. We also find sometimes people’s downpipes are incorrectly plumbed into the wastewater network.”

Watercare’s crews can only attend to a wet weather overflow to thoroughly clean when the overflow has stopped.

“Given it’s raining again today, there may be some delays to attending overflows. We’re asking our customers to bear with us while we get through these jobs as soon as possible.”

To report a wastewater overflow, please go to https://www.watercare.co.nz/Faults-outages/Report-a-fault or use the LiveChat on the website.

Dams at 100%

Toms says: “Yesterday’s rainfall also pushed Auckland’s total water storage back to 100%. Historically, the average total storage level at this time of year is 76.3%.

“With the enormous amount of rain Auckland has seen in recent times, our dams have remained above 95% full since July last year.”

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