Darelle Jenkins, senior regional manager for Hospitality NZ, says the organisation's Queenstown members are adapting to the boil water notice and coming up with crafty ways to keep their customers safe. Photo: RNZ / Niva Chittock
Queenstown hospitality venues are finding creative ways to deal with the boil water notice as tourists stream in for the school holidays.
There have now been 31 confirmed cases of the cryptosporidium gastro bug among residents and visitors to the town in the past month.
Queenstown looked picture perfect today - snow capped mountains, a clear sky, bustling town centre and a glassy blue lake.
Visitors were taking the fact there might be something in the water in their stride.
"We were a little bit worried having a 10-month-old, but we will just use our bottled water and if we need to use anything else we'll just buy or boil water. But hopefully it's not too much of an issue," one visitor from Wānaka said.
"We've been boiling our water for coffee and tea, as of right now, we've haven't felt sick or anything. We've also been drinking a lot of bottled water," said another from USA.
"It's a bit inconvenient sometimes because it would be nice just to fill up our water bottles out of the faucet but we're used to it, we're from Houston, Texas, and we normally don't drink out of the faucet," her travel partner said.
"I mean given a place like Queenstown, we would've expected it would be fine."
The source of the outbreak was still not known, with teams working around the clock to try to track it down.
Medical Officer of Health Dr Susan Jack said a few of the cases were visitors from outside Queenstown.
"We are strongly urging anyone who has been in Queenstown who has diarrhoea or abdominal pain symptoms to call their GP or go to Queenstown Medical Centre if they don't have a GP to organise testing," she said.
"The more cases that we can get and interview, the more chance we've got to find out what the source is."
So far, water test results from central venues had come back clear but cryptosporidium was far from straight forward to find, mayor Glyn Lewers said.
"When we test the water at a business, we're looking between the business and the network interface, and if we see a residual chlorine drop, that might be an indication that we might be getting some cross-contamination from other sources outside of our networks," he said.
"The added complication is if there's a carbon filter between our network and the private network that we're testing, because carbon reacts with the residual chlorine."
Water test results from central venues in the town have so far come back clear but cryptosporidium is far from straight forward to find, says Queenstown Lakes Mayor Glyn Lewers. Photo: RNZ / Niva Chittock
Darelle Jenkins, senior regional manager for Hospitality NZ, said members had been getting crafty to keep customers safe.
"We've had some members hook up their coffee machines to jerry cans [full of water from Arrowtown]; we've had some members utilise the ice that can't be put in drinks to keep bottles of drinks cool," she said.
Another hospitality owner told RNZ their brewer had been filling empty kegs with water so they had water on tap.
"You just adapt and get on with it. There's plenty more things to come to Queenstown for than just tap water," Jenkins said.
"There's probably not many places in the world where international tourists would go and not expect to buy a bottle of water. It's kind of a natural thing for a lot of people to do.
"We are very lucky in this country and especially in this town that usually, tap water is free and beautiful to drink."
A few members had even adopted the tongue-in-cheek slogan 'be safe - drink beer', Jenkins said.
The next step was seeing if hospitality businesses could be supplied with water, she said.
Queenstown Lakes District Council had already put a water bottle refill station in Earnslaw Park, two large tankers in Athol Park and two more in Frankton, at the events centre.
So how long would it be until the jerry can was back to being filled with petrol?
Plans for a protozoa detection barrier to be added to the Two Mile water treatment plant were due to be finished in the next few days, Lewers said.
"Talking with staff on the ground and suppliers, the best-case scenario is probably seven to eight weeks, the worst case is just a little bit longer than that. We'll probably have a better idea of it come the end of this week."
Until then, bagged ice was clinking in the cocktails, tankers had safe water on tap and word on the street was bottled tastes better than boiled.