Maniototo towns told to boil water until December
In a statement this morning, the Central Otago District Council said the precautionary advisory had been issued for residents connected to the Maniototo towns' water supplies, while upgrades were under way for both treatment plants.
The council said both towns' water treatment processes used chlorine to remove any risk of bacteria in the water supply, but they did not have a treatment barrier for protozoa - microscopic organisms, such as cryptosporidium and giardia, which can enter the water from animal faeces.
If present, protozoa can cause gastrointestinal illness such as vomiting and diarrhoea. Babies, young children, pregnant women, the elderly and people who have weakened immune systems are more at risk of illness.
CODC Group Manager - Three Waters Julie Muir said the council had approved the procurement of water treatment plant upgrades in January. The new treatment equipment was being prefabricated off-site and would be relocated when ready for installation. The upgrades were expected to be completed by December.
She said the treatment plant upgrades included the addition of filtration and ultraviolet treatment systems.
"These will supplement existing treatment processes to deliver safe drinking water that meets New Zealand Drinking Water Standards.
"The UV treatment will eliminate protozoa risks and the filtration system will improve the resilience of these supplies and enable them to continue operating in a wider range of weather conditions.
'There has been no change to the water supply on these schemes. However, the continued absence of protozoa barriers presents a risk to public health,' Ms Muir said.
'We understand this advisory will be an inconvenience for residents, and council is committed to providing monthly progress updates to the community on the upgrades.
"Taking this step will help protect the health of our communities until the new treatment systems are in place. Boiling water is an effective way to remove the risk of illness caused by protozoa.'
Health Information
The source water for the Patearoa and Ranfurly schemes comes from the Sowburn and Eweburn rivers. These are surface water sources that may be accessed by animals. If animal faeces enter the water, protozoa may be introduced into the supply, posing a potential health risk.
Residents connected to the Patearoa and Ranfurly water supplies must boil all water used for:
Drinking water
Brushing teeth
Preparing food
Washing fruits and vegetables
Making ice, baby formula, juice and cold beverages
How to boil water for drinking:
Bring water to a rolling boil (where bubbles appear and do not disappear when the water is stirred) for one minute or boil a full electric jug until it switches off.
Cool the water (do not use ice cubes to do this) and pour it into a clean container with a lid.
Refrigerate until needed.
Residents with well-maintained, high-quality cartridge filters followed by ultraviolet disinfection units that supply their entire house do not need to boil their water.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
14-07-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Maniototo towns told to boil water until December
A boil water advisory issued for Patearoa and Ranfurly residents will remain in effect until upgrades are completed in December. In a statement this morning, the Central Otago District Council said the precautionary advisory had been issued for residents connected to the Maniototo towns' water supplies, while upgrades were under way for both treatment plants. The council said both towns' water treatment processes used chlorine to remove any risk of bacteria in the water supply, but they did not have a treatment barrier for protozoa - microscopic organisms, such as cryptosporidium and giardia, which can enter the water from animal faeces. If present, protozoa can cause gastrointestinal illness such as vomiting and diarrhoea. Babies, young children, pregnant women, the elderly and people who have weakened immune systems are more at risk of illness. CODC Group Manager - Three Waters Julie Muir said the council had approved the procurement of water treatment plant upgrades in January. The new treatment equipment was being prefabricated off-site and would be relocated when ready for installation. The upgrades were expected to be completed by December. She said the treatment plant upgrades included the addition of filtration and ultraviolet treatment systems. "These will supplement existing treatment processes to deliver safe drinking water that meets New Zealand Drinking Water Standards. "The UV treatment will eliminate protozoa risks and the filtration system will improve the resilience of these supplies and enable them to continue operating in a wider range of weather conditions. 'There has been no change to the water supply on these schemes. However, the continued absence of protozoa barriers presents a risk to public health,' Ms Muir said. 'We understand this advisory will be an inconvenience for residents, and council is committed to providing monthly progress updates to the community on the upgrades. "Taking this step will help protect the health of our communities until the new treatment systems are in place. Boiling water is an effective way to remove the risk of illness caused by protozoa.' Health Information The source water for the Patearoa and Ranfurly schemes comes from the Sowburn and Eweburn rivers. These are surface water sources that may be accessed by animals. If animal faeces enter the water, protozoa may be introduced into the supply, posing a potential health risk. Residents connected to the Patearoa and Ranfurly water supplies must boil all water used for: Drinking water Brushing teeth Preparing food Washing fruits and vegetables Making ice, baby formula, juice and cold beverages How to boil water for drinking: Bring water to a rolling boil (where bubbles appear and do not disappear when the water is stirred) for one minute or boil a full electric jug until it switches off. Cool the water (do not use ice cubes to do this) and pour it into a clean container with a lid. Refrigerate until needed. Residents with well-maintained, high-quality cartridge filters followed by ultraviolet disinfection units that supply their entire house do not need to boil their water.
Scoop
06-06-2025
- Scoop
Otago Central Lakes Strategic Health Report Available To Public
Press Release – Southern Lakes Health Trust The Strategic Report identifies opportunities to increase public health services in Otago Central Lakes by partnering with the private sector to invest in services and infrastructure to benefit our region. The Otago Central Lakes [1] Health Services & Assets project has publicly released the Strategic Report sent to Minister of Health Hon Simeon Brown in February 2025. The work supporting the Strategic Report is a collaborative effort, led by Joseph Mooney, MP for Southland and involving Health New Zealand, Central Otago District Council. Queenstown Lakes District Council, rural health providers, iwi, including kaupapa Māori health providers, local MPs, and the community. 'We have a clear objective; to expedite planning and investment in health services and infrastructure in Otago Central Lakes,' Mr Mooney says. The Strategic Report identifies opportunities to increase public health services in Otago Central Lakes by partnering with the private sector to invest in services and infrastructure to benefit our region. 'As we have outlined to the Minister, this project is not asking for public funds but is seeking support to effectively progress the opportunities and initiatives we have put forward,' says Miles Anderson, MP for Waitaki and member of the project's Steering Committee. Mayors of Queenstown Lakes District Council and Central Otago District Council also sit on the Steering Committee. 'The Strategic Report aligns with the component of the Regional Deal proposal that QLDC and CODC are partners to, towards developing innovative approaches to the area's health system. We look forward to feedback and direction from the Minister of Health, Simeon Brown on the Strategic Report and how this will help inform work on a health needs assessment for the area,' says QLDC Mayor Glyn Lewers. '70 per cent of New Zealanders who live two or more hours from a hospital live in Otago Central Lakes. Our proposal will bring healthcare closer to our residents and help to reduce demand on our regions' base hospitals in Dunedin and Invercargill,' says CODC Mayor Tamah Alley. 'Our approach will lead to far more streamlined and effective healthcare for this rapidly growing population. We have presented a strong plan to improve things for our people,' says Steering Committee member and ACT MP Todd Stephenson. [1] 'Otago Central Lakes' = areas currently encompassed by Central Otago District Council and Queenstown Lakes District Council, including Queenstown, Arrowtown, Kingston, Glenorchy, Wanaka, Luggate, Lake Hawea, Cardrona, Cromwell, Clyde, Alexandra, Roxburgh, Ranfurly.
Newsroom
04-06-2025
- Newsroom
Jacinda, glossed over
There are gaps, big gaps, in the new memoir by Jacinda Ardern. It is not a book which gives the full political context of her rise and fall, or at least her rise and exit. There's not as much as might be expected on the Covid years. No mention at all of her 2020 election opponent Judith Collins, with very little on other Nats. Bare references to the Covid-era economic borrowing and spending, or of the suite of second-term political quicksands like Three Waters that dragged her government and Ardern personally down. It is a global book, not local. New Zealand politics in the abstract. Yet she opens up in many areas, and avoids the traps of political autobiographies in which the great and good name drop, show off, reinvent history and attack their opponents. There's minimal retailing of conversations with world leaders. She shares observations about Prince William from close quarters, warms to Angela Merkel, reveals her message on the phone to Donald Trump after the mosque terror attacks – for the US (and by implication the President) to show sympathy and love to 'all Muslims' – and recalls Malcolm Turnbull helping her at an Apec security check. No indulgences with Trudeau or Xi or Boris, no Bolger-style 'As I was telling the President'. For someone so studied, prepared and self-aware, it's remarkable how often Ardern just blurted out her most famous lines. 'Let's Do This', the election slogan that helped Labour win power in 2017, was at first a throwaway line on one of her Instagram posts. 'Kindness' came out as the essence of what she wanted her Government to exhibit, in a conversation with John Campbell as she drove to Government House to be sworn in as Prime Minister in 2017. 'They Are Us', the nation's unifying cry after the Christchurch mosque massacres in 2019, was something she said as she downloaded to her friend Grant Robertson in a moment of dread and despair, when about to address the nation. He told her, 'Just say that.' The origins of the phrases are gently revealed among the scores of anecdotes and insights in A Different Kind of Power. In each instance she appears surprised at herself, a 'chronic overthinker' who has realtime discoveries of the mot juste, of the historic. 'Kindness,' she muses after recalling the Campbell conversation. 'It is a child's word, in a way. Simple. And yet it encompassed everything that had left an imprint on me.' The book also peels back the deeper origins of her ability, on the spot, to capture a mood, to distil her purpose and look to inspire – and the origins of her senses of compassion and social justice. It leans heavily on Ardern's personal formation and challenges. It is a different kind of memoir. And that will make it stand out among the reminiscences and revelations of New Zealand political leaders. She writes at some length about growing up in Te Aroha, Murupara and Morrinsville, about her family, and about her life in the Mormon church. The family memories are powerful: The primary school-aged Jacinda coming across her father Ross, the police sergeant in Murupara, surrounded by menacing men 'in leather pants and jackets' outside his station, and being told 'Keep walking Jacinda', unable to help. Her mother Laurel's mental breakdown in the same forestry town. Murupara was tough. Poverty, struggle, gangs, unfairness. Ardern writes that years later, when asked when she first became political, she realised it was there in that central North Island community. 'I became political because I lived in Murupara.' Then in an ordered, chronological way A Different Kind of Power traverses high school, knocking on doors for the church, university, initial political awakenings, OE and the pull of national politics. In every phase there is a building of the picture of a woman who is at once sensitive to a fault, image-conscious, self-conscious, media-conscious and trying to live by her own conscience. Open and closed Ardern can write. No surprises there, with the talent for communicating, messaging and indentifying with her audiences that she showed us over 14 years in politics. She professes herself, in the acknowledgements, to have been a 'speechwriter' since the age of 13, and implies the book benefited hugely from Ali Benjamin who she credits with being 'teacher, editor and coach all rolled into one'. Yet a ghost didn't write this; Ardern's voice is obvious from the opening dedication 'to the criers, worriers and huggers' to the final words. Memoir writing is thinking, lived experience, revelation and anticipation of what the reader might want answered. There was always going to be a mountain of material to sift through. Ardern's answer is to be relentlessly open, personally, and largely subdued and non-controversial politically. In the opening scene as she awaits a pregnancy test result in a friend's bathroom she wonders about the day's coalition talks and her feeling the equivalent of imposter syndrome. 'We were never meant to win. And I was never meant to be leader.' The book's title A Different Kind of Power might betray a hint of a self-help text, a motivational Ted talk or a 'how to win elections and influence history' lecture. It's much more than that. It offers up Jacinda Ardern as a lifelong doubter who through conviction, talent, political accidents and then empathy, rose to international acclaim. What's missing from this book is almost as interesting as what it covers. For example, she doesn't indulge the haters, giving a complete swerve to that daft, ubiquitous, corrosive series of online and social media rumours about her husband Clarke. Her story is not a platform to even scores – not many of them, anyway. The book is clearly for an audience extending beyond these shores, so the detail of domestic politics is relatively sparse. Don Brash, on the other side of politics, is harshly dismissed, and David Cunliffe, on her own, qualifies for the strongest and most detailed dressing down. Ardern plainly has no time for the man who famously declared he was sorry for being a man. There's a tantalising window into Labour's caucus room after Cunliffe's historic defeat in 2014. 'By convention what is said in a caucus room stays in the caucus room, and it's a convention I will always follow,' she writes, nobly but disappointingly limiting herself to describing and paraphrasing tears and anger, fury and despair. Ardern the party leader won two elections from two. In A Different Kind of Power, it's not exactly 'losers get off the stage', but her book describes John Key, the Prime Minister for the first eight years of her time in Parliament in a perfunctory paragraph. It gives his successor Bill English part of one line and a mention about the campaign debates, and ignores her 2020 opponent Judith Collins entirely. The yawning question That year, 2020, and the epoch-defining Covid deaths and lockdowns that followed into 2021, are peculiarly consigned to very late in the book, taking their chronological place from 280 pages in. For the haters who will want to pore over her justifications for the pandemic policies and their grievances, the book will disappoint. Ardern threads accounts of Level 3 crisis decisions at the Beehive alongside home bubble experiences with husband Clarke, daughter Neve and mum Laurel. These brief, fascinating two chapters on the Covid years give a glancing view into a Beehive in the time of crisis. 'It's rare that you can draw a direct line between a politician's decision and whether someone lived or died,' Ardern writes. 'But this seemed to be one of them.' Fitting the minimalist recounting of the Covid days, Sir Ashley Bloomfield rates a one-sentence cameo. Ardern reflects on the later parliamentary protest not so much as a personal or political condemnation as being a systemic lesson: 'Whatever had brought the protesters to Parliament, by the end, it was clear that is was a place and institution they didn't believe in anymore.' Years on, the ex-PM who is now a world away at Harvard, asks herself the yawning question. Does she have regrets about the Covid decisions and years? 'Yes, I think about regret,' she writes, but 'that word regret contains so much certainty. Regret says you know precisely what you would have done differently … We don't get to see the counterfactual, the outcome of the decisions we didn't make. The lives that might have been lost. One thing I am certain of is that I would want things to have been different. I would want a world where we saved lives and we brought everyone with us. Perhaps that is the difference between regret and remorse.' Or the difference between the perfect and the optimal. Resignation and new life If the book's Covid-era brevity seems a little short-changing, it is likely deliberate. After all, A Different Kind of Power is about being able to rise, in spite of your doubts or fears, to the occasion of running the country or handling a crisis – not about the detail of actually running the country or the crisis itself. Its difference is in viewing empathy and kindness, hugs, tears and compassion as political virtues in a world that judges them vices. Ardern is astonished when a social media poster at the time of the Whakaari White island disaster claimed she went to Whakatāne just so she could be photographed hugging people. And that makes her even more determined. 'The post bothered me more than I wanted to admit,' she writes, and then tells of meeting a female ambulance officer who'd helped on the day, the woman hugging her, with the cameras clicking. 'I knew this would only feed my critics, the ones who were cynical about empathy, who thought that everything was somehow a show. That's fine, I thought as I hugged her tight in return. I would rather be criticised than stop being human.' She outlines in the final brief chapters how that criticism, the cynicism, the always-on-alert responsibility of her job, helped convince her to resign. There's the story of a mystery woman sidling up to her at an airport bathroom, pressing in and hissing 'Thank you for ruining the country'. There's Ardern's fear upon being told she needed a scan for a lump in her breast and wondering 'perhaps I could leave' office, a feeling that didn't leave her despite the risk of cancer being ruled out. There are two instances of snapping at or about people – calling David Seymour an arrogant prick and pushing hard against a journalist for asking a sexist question at a press conference with the Finnish PM. And there's Ardern suggesting to her chief of staff that she worried, in 2023 at the start of an election year, she might have become a lightning rod for attack, and could damage Labour's chances of winning and of its policies enduring. And, in that most ordinary of family occurrences, young Neve asks why her mum needs to Work. So. Much. As the book rushes to a close, the announcement of her resignation, the political and public reaction and the accession of Chris Hipkins as Prime Minister to lead Labour forward are largely glossed over. That's a fail, maybe resulting from an American editor scrawling 'who, what, who cares?' in the margins and deleting. There's nothing on The Wedding, and just a mention of moving to Boston, with nothing of the new life. More importantly, also absent are all the issues of political (mis)management beyond Covid – Three Waters, ministerial conduct, law and order failures, stubborn child poverty and emergency housing – that rose up inexorably in Ardern's second term. Remember, Labour burned more political capital in that term – from an outright MMP majority to 27 percent and defeat – than probably any government other than the Fourth Labour Government of 1987-90. But A Different Kind of Power doesn't dwell on the negative or even acknowledge it. Right at the end, Ardern summarises her role-model message to any young woman doubting her right to be in a position or place. Embrace your sensitivity and empathy. 'In fact, all of the traits that you believe are your flaws will come to be your strengths.' That might well be true for Ardern, or for an individual. It's not so for a government. A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $59.99) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom has devoted all week to coverage of the book. Monday: experts in the book trade predict it will fly off the shelves. Tuesday: a review by Steve Braunias. Wednesday: a review by Janet Wilson.
