Kawerau District Council says that after months of investigation, the cause of the brown water coming from people’s taps is becoming clearer, and hopefully the water will follow suit.
The council’s water services team have been working hard to get to the bottom of the sporadic brown colouring of the water, says Mayor Faylene Tunui.
Image: Kawerau District Council.
Operations and services manager Hanno Van der Merwe says the council used three water sources to supply the town, the Tarawera bore, the Umukaraka spring and Te Wai o Marukaa, known colloquially as the Pumphouse spring.
For the next three weeks, the council would change its water source to the Tarawera bore as higher than usual levels of manganese had been traced to the Marukaa spring.
Hanno says due to heavy rainfall over the past six months, the council stopped taking water from the Umukaraka spring in December, because of the possibility of contamination of the spring from increased levels of groundwater.
The council has been using the Marukaa spring, which has been reliably supplying the town for the past 70 years. However, Hanno says tests showed the spring had recently been showing increased levels of manganese, which turns brown when it is mixed with chlorine.
He says it took some time for the water to turn brown once the chlorine was added.
This graph supplied by Kawerau District Council shows that complaints of discolouration of water first started in 2018 at the time chlorine was added to the water supply.
