This is a different example. So this was Walkerton, Canada in 2000. So what happened here, they’ve got some bores, they have cows around and they’ve got E. coli, a particular type of E. coli that are carried in cow manure into the bores.
Because they had set up a contract with, they have a performance-based contract with the contractor if they haven’t got the chlorine in, they’ve got massive financial penalties.
It just so happens that the guy who was the contractor was the brother of the guy who was running the water supply. Now, there’s a little bit of a conflict of interest there.
So rather than put their hand up the minute they knew about it and said, hey we’ve got cow poo in our water supply and you could boil the water and not drink it for a while.
They didn’t say anything for three or four days. And in that time, yeah, seven people dead, and 1500 people ill.
And they had a massive inquiry. One of the brothers went to jail, the other one got a community sentence. The seven people who were dead and can’t come back.
Some of those people will have lifelong injuries from it, they will never recover.
But over here in New Zealand, there are public health officials who looked at that and say hey, nothing would stop that from happening in New Zealand, so we’ve got water safety plans, about a billion dollars of capital on small-town water treatment, increased long-term operations, and maintenance cost, and increase levels of service, which will increase cost.
So that was in Canada and of course all these costs here in New Zealand. And Flint is going to do the same thing to New Zealand as Havelock.
So, what happens is, people, go, oh there’s that risk but we don’t know how to manage it. So, what do we do?
We’ve got legislation, regulations, dah dah dah… the cost goes up, whether we’re actually managing risk any better is anybody’s guess.
Coming back to this diagram here.
Those interrelationships and how they interact with life cycle management.
That’s what you’re describing in an asset management plan is quite important as you have real-world consequences.
And these bits a bit we struggle to explain to our decision-makers and the risk side of it. Okay, so, you just have to watch out for that, where the gaps are.
[…] if we know that for sports, and we also know from the practice of infrastructure management that consistent investment also wins, why do we think we can do this, which is shown in this graph […]