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The combined effort of the residents of Wellington City, Porirua, Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt saved over a staggering 175 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water over summer, preventing tighter water restrictions across the region.

Thanks to Wellingtonian’s continued work to conserve water, the Wellington Metropolitan Region can begin to move down water restriction levels.

Thanks to South Wairarapa residents keeping an eye on their water use, the region can shift down to Level 1 water restrictions on Wednesday May 1st. The shift follows the Ruamahanga River returning to acceptable levels and cooler temperatures contributing to a reduction in demand.

Lower river levels over the past weekend, which forced the temporary shutdown of the Wainuiomata water treatment plant, have been a timely reminder for the need for level 2 Water restrictions, even though summer has ended.

In May 2023, Wellington City Council (WCC) decided to invest an additional $2.3m into fixing more leaks in the WCC drinking water network with the condition to undertake a review of Wellington Water Limited’s frontline operations.

Wellington Water has been provided with both a final version of an Executive Summary and a redacted final version, but not the full document, of the detailed Contract Optimisation Review (the “report”) conducted by reviewer FieldForce4 at the request of WCC. Wellington Water does not accept the report and is unable to approve or sign off on the report’s recommendations.

Wellingtonians' continued efforts to conserve water and cooler weather ahead mean an escalation to Level 3 water restrictions has significantly reduced.

“Thanks Wellington – thanks to you we’ve made it through a tricky summer and avoided tighter water restrictions together,” says Charles Barker, Director of Regulatory Services.

“Today we have run the numbers again and what this shows is that the hard mahi of the community has really paid off with the likelihood of moving to Level 3 dropping down to 16 per cent."

There has been a drop in fluoride levels in the drinking water across the Wellington region over the past four months. This means that Wellington Water has not been able to meet the Ministry of Health (MoH) fluoride target levels of 0.7 – 1.0ppm, 95% of the time.

Wellington Water is working with Greater Wellington and Hutt City Council on upgrades to make sure water from the Waterloo Treatment Plant is compliant with new rules set out by Taumata Arowai, the national water services regulator. The new rules require water from the treatment plant to have longer contact time with chlorine through the treatment process than was previously required, to further reduce the risk of bacteria.

The hard work of residents in the Wellington region to reduce their water use and follow water restrictions has meant that we’ve avoided moving to Level 3 water restrictions for another week.

The opening ceremony for the Omāroro Reservoir takes place today, with the site at Prince of Wales Park in Mount Cook being handed back to Wellington City Council and the public.