SCRAMBLE FOR WATER

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 291, 29 February 1928, Page 16

SCRAMBLE FOR WATER

CITY’S WAITAKERE ERRORS METROPOLITAN BOARD URGED Not only the suburban bodies and residents on the Auckland side of the harbour, but also those on the North Shore are interesting themselves in the city water supplies. A North Shore resident writes to Tho Sun supporting the demand for a metropolitan water board. He states: “With a water famine menacing the city, and some of the suburbs that relied on the city’s promises to give them water, quick and definite changes of policy are needed. There does not seem to be any method of securing an independent and rapid survey of the water bungle with a view to sheeting home the blame, nor would that give the citizens water. “One fact cannot be smothered up—the Waitakeres have failed to yield water despite the assertion of the city engineer before the Water Commission that he could forecast a run off of 1,680 gallons an acre a day in a dry year as a minimum, on which the precious commission in its faith commented: ‘This is a reasonable and sound estimate.'

The same engineer now claims to be getting about 1£ millions gallons a day from the Waitakere reservoir catchment area; equal to 755 gallons an acre a day. So much for estimate and the fact; and for the judgment of the comm.ssion. Yields in similar country elsewhere along the coast have been found to drop to 60 gallons an acre a day! Few engineers in the city beheve that Waitakere is giving a run off now of 755 gallons an acre. in spite of the heavy expenditure the city ° n the ed & e of a water famine, and if it were not for the Western Springs which the citizens share with the zoo animals, the city would have been waterless at the end of January.

HUIA INSUFFICIENT “Great faith is being- placed by the city grandfathers on the Huia," but this creek has been gauged at under one million gallons a day; so that even if it is turned into the pipes by next summer the city will be little better off. It will have one effect to which public attention has not been drawn; the cost of water to the city will be pushed , Th o figures given before the Water Commission by the town clerk even though based on the inflated figures used in relation to the draw-off in -“?e city, showed that an extra 3.72 d a 1,000 gallons will be payable as the resu Jt of the Huia and the filters expenditure, excluding operating and maintenance costs; plus id a 1,000 gallons for filtering* That is to say, the cost of the charges will be fkout .Lid a 1,000 gallons. In short, the Waitakeres have not only fallen down as a source of supply, but they have reached the limit of their economical development, for water can be brought to the city at less cost and in greater quantity. “The control of the water supply must be taken out of the city’s powerless hands, as was the electrical energy supply question. It should be delegated to a special board—preferably a metropolitan board, on which all the suburbs could confidently and without suspicion be represented. That board would be charged with the duty of getting ample water at a minimum price in the quickest time. It could

take over the Waitakere schemes as far as they are developed and thus let the city out of the impasse its shortsightedness has got it into, and relieve it of a job that it has failed on.

“Let down by its governing body and threatened by disease and misery caused by water famine; with empty reservoirs in the hills and a prospect of scrambling with the zoo inmates for the dangerous Western Springs water, the time has come for the city to abandon the present useless method of controlling water supplies. A board is essential. Let the city have it.”

Royal Naval Reserve Drill was agreed at the Harbour i*°-. 9Tlß j u v» ing yesterday that a site in * Street to be used as headquarter® drill hall only should be leas , -*3Royal Naval Reserve at an annual tal of £2O.