Meet the team: water treatment lead Dwane

"No matter what day of the week it is, this plant needs to be maintained to comply with drinking water standards. It’s a lot more involved than people realise."

Turn on your tap and water appears. But it's no small job getting that water from its source to your home. Every day, our water treatment team lead Dwane and his team of eight make sure we all have safe drinking water.

Tell us about your job

We look after the drinking water for the whole district from Taupō to Tūrangi, Mangakino and Whareroa, back around to Tirohanga. In all, we have 17 different water plants and a variety of different water sources too, from spring water to lake water, bore water, and river water. It can be quite challenging.

What does your job involve?

Here at the Taupō water treatment plant, we supply from Acacia Bay to Waitahanui and everything in between. Every day, we make sure that the water meets a minimum compliance standard/quality, and if not there are steps we take to make sure that we follow up on what’s gone wrong; and resolve it.

Other than that, it’s day-to-day stuff like plant checks, making sure everything is right, calibrating instruments, taking water samples to be tested in the laboratory for quality assurance. There's maintenance like cleaning intake screens, reservoir checks, monitoring plant performance trends, stuff like that.

We also have new projects that are coming to the stage where they’re going to get built. Kinloch [water treatment plant] is coming on, Omori too, both of those are new membrane plants. We have UV [disinfection] plants coming on at Waihāhā and Ātiamuri. We’ve also recently completed UV plant upgrades at River Road and Whakamaru water supplies.

What do you like about what you do?

No two days are the same. There’s always something different, it changes every day and it’s a good team to work with too.

What’s your secret superpower?

Problem solving. I have a background working with pumps before I joined council 11 years ago. I’ll make it work or find a way around it to make it work.

What do you do when you’re not at work?

I hang out with my kids, who are 6 and 9 and I love fishing, whether trout fishing around here or chasing snapper out at sea.