Ag 03 july, 2017

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Monday, July 3, 2017

Since Sept 27, 1879

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THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF MID CANTERBURY

Glitz and glamour at college ball Ashburton College students and their ball partners had an enjoyable evening at the Ashburton Trust Event Centre on Friday.

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Testing ‘took time’ BY SUSAN SANDYS

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Community and Public Health (CPH) do not arbitrarily introduce boil water notices without test results to back up such action, says the Ashburton District Council. Community relations manager Vincie Billante was responding to concerns over why it took so long for residents to be warned about boiling drinking water, following a power outage at the town’s water plant overnight Thursday. The outage meant water supplied for a period of hours on Friday was not fully treated. Staff and contractors attended on Friday morning and the plant was operating normally again from midday. But the council did not announce this until after 6.30pm on Friday. It posted the precautionary boil water notice to its Facebook page, made sure it went to other relevant Facebook forums, contacted media outlets and Methven

Community Board members. “This all happened within a half hour of receiving notification from CPH, around 6.30 to 6.40pm on Friday,” Billante said. Board members contacted hotels and pubs and let businesses know about the precautionary notice. “Methven Community Board stepped up, used their networks to contact the locals as soon as possible,” Billante said. But it was not soon enough for many commenting on the posts, with people asking why it had taken so long to inform the public about the risk the power outage presented. Billante said Community and Public Health were following procedure when they did not issue the precautionary notice any earlier. “They don’t just arbitrarily put a boil water notice on without the evidence to back it up. They needed to do the testing which took the time, and once the test

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results came back that’s when they put the notice on,” she said. “As council officers were onsite obtaining water samples from various sites and fixing the equipment on Friday morning and afternoon to restore operations to full capacity, the results from the water samples took time to come back from the laboratory,” Billante explained further in a council Facebook post last night. The chlorine residual test results came back late Friday, and three of the samples showed inadequate residual chlorine, triggering the precautionary notice. Two clear E Coli test results have come back over the weekend, with the final one to come back this morning. Three clear tests need to be received in order for CPH to lift the precautionary notice, which would be around lunchtime.

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