Hanmer Springs cafes stop serving coffee after water contamination
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CHARLIE MITCHELL
Last updated 17:26, February 29 2016
It resulted in the supermarket selling out of bottled water and some cafes no longer serving coffee.
For locals, it could not have come at a worse time — the height of summer meant the town was humming with tourists.
Edwin Van De Koolwijk, who runs both a bus service and a restaurant, said the water situation had been a challenge.
"It's really frustrating, particularly in the high [tourism] season. Some of the bigger restaurants have had a really annoying couple of days now."
Staff at cafes and restaurants had been boiling and storing hundreds of litres of water at a time, while explaining to customers why they couldn't drink water from the tap.
Two months ago, Hanmer Springs ran out of water entirely. "Crunchy," occasionally yellow drinking water in other parts of the district have prompted complaints of illness.
Tourists often complained about water issues in the district, Van De Koolwijk said.
"It's very unstable and just not good enough. In this day and age, in a first world country, we shouldn't have these issues. It needs to be solved, one way or the other."
Before the boil notice can be lifted, three tests must show a negative reading for E.coli. This would likely take at least 10 days, the council said.
Zane Inglis, who owns a local restaurant and bar, said he expected to have 1000 customers over that time, with the water issues potentially affecting business.
Boiling the tap water gave it a strange taste, so he had resorted to giving out bottled water.
"The boiling of water and storing it for so long is probably the hardest part," he said.
"We're probably using 500 litres of water per day up here. It's just time consuming."
The treatment plant was state-of-the-art so it was unclear how a contamination could have occurred, said Hanmer Springs councillor Jason Fletcher.
The most recent water sample had shown no trace of E.coli.
"Even the best of equipment can fail at times, or you can have rogue tests.
"We're still uncertain why it has come to be, so it's a matter of finding out in the first instance why we had a test showing there was an issue."
He understood the frustration in the town, which relied on its tourism trade.
"It's not an ideal situation, particularly given we're a tourism town. But people are pretty resilient here, and get about their business by doing what they need to do."
- Stuff
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