The drought has finally broken, and it ends months of water deliveries to households that have run out of tank water, adding up to nearly 6.5 million litres for one tanker business.
Since the beginning of November, Nigel McMorran and Michelle Payne have delivered the equivalent of three Olympic swimming pools of water to households in the Waimea and Moutere that depend on rainwater to fill their tanks. Michelle says two other water delivery businesses would have each delivered similar quantities to the same area.
Their own deliveries averaged 1.5 million litres a month this year, which is about double the amount they typically deliver through the dry summer months to households that are not connected to a water supply scheme.
“People don’t realise how much you need water until they don’t have it and that’s when they turn the tap on and there’s nothing there.”
Michelle says their business, Hard Yards, works alongside the other two tanker businesses to deliver water when there is high demand, and this summer was one of those years. At one point they had 37 households waiting for water with some waiting up to four days just before Christmas due to demand. It meant long days, day after day, to deliver crucial water to homes in the region.
Water was also delivered for stock and Michelle says one farmer bought water for the first time in 10 years, while another had to buy water after a bore ran dry for the first time in 40 years.
Michelle and Nigel started their business in 2019 – the year of the Pigeon Valley fire – and say they have delivered far more water through this season than that dry year. In the past, water deliveries have usually petered out in March, whereas this year they were still delivering well into April, when the rain finally came.
It takes just nine seconds to fill a 13,000-litre tanker at the McShane Road filling station, though when strict water restrictions were placed on the area the tanker had to head to Motueka to fill up. The water itself costs about $425 for households and Michelle says that when people ask her how many tanks to put on their property, she tells them to get four, five or “as many as you can put on”.
She says it is a learning curve for many people on tank water for the first time and it takes a dry year to learn how to really conserve water.
“The people we deliver to one year, we generally don’t deliver so much the next year because they learn they need to conserve water in summer. Once you run out, it’s hard to get ahead of the game.”
Some household use their fire-fighting tank of water when the other tanks run out, but Michelle warns that can affect insurances and it is better to have sufficient tanks and conserve water.
