Wellington Water
Very High Criticality Assets Programme
The Challenge
Wellington Water had limited information to base their underground asset renewal strategy upon and their assets had some recent spectacular failures. Wellington Water experienced some critical infrastructure failures. Some of which made local and national headlines.
As you can imagine, the community wanted reassurance that their water supply would be reliable and their wastewater would not pollute the environment by overflowing into the harbour.
The stakeholders also needed to know why this was happening and how to prevent it in the future.
Wellington Water did not have a clear understanding of the condition of their most critical infrastructure. They needed the right strategy to reduce the number of failures, put an end to the negative press, and help them increase the reliability of their infrastructure going forward.
The Solution
Wellington Water needed an Intervention Strategy. So they began to look around at who could help them create one. That’s when WellingtonWater brought ProjectMax onto the scene.
ProjectMax are the Water Infrastructure experts. They wrote the New Zealand Pipe Inspection Manual and consulted the Department of Internal Affairs on the upcoming Three Waters Reform. So with all of this experience, they were the best fit to solve Wellington Water’s problems.
The Intervention Strategy created for Wellington Water defined:
- The right data that needs to be collected
- The techniques that would be used to collect the data
- How Wellington Water can use that data to understand the health and remaining life of its assets
- How Wellington Water can use that data to determine the correct intervention approach
After the strategy phase, ProjectMax helped Wellington Water execute the agreed strategy and provided technical advice and support. ProjectMax also carried out the Health Assessments based on the data that Wellington Water collected so they could provide a programme to:
- Maintain their infrastructure
- Conduct Health Assessments on their own
- Renew their infrastructure
- Better understand the risks and how to prevent them
The Result
While this project is ongoing, Wellington Water already sees the benefits of putting this programme into action. They were able to recover from the critical infrastructure failures. But even more importantly, they have a strategy to reduce and prevent failures going forward. And they have a better idea of the future investment required.
The Wellington community is also happy that their drinking water supply is more reliable than before, and their wastewater is not ending up in places it shouldn’t.
All in all, we call that a massive win.
Maybe you don’t have a bad article on a major news website yet. But if you put the right plan in place, you can prevent those critical failures from happening and give your community the most reliable water infrastructure possible.
We are the experts in helping water utilities just like you create and implement these strategies. If you’d like to be confident that your infrastructure is running at its best, book a call with us today.