Burst water main floods major Wellington street, outage spreads to suburbs

Some Wellington residents are being told to store water as a precaution as a burst water main on major traffic route in central Wellington looks set to cause water outages in parts of the city centre and surrounding suburbs.

The pipe burst early this morning, and Wellington Water is not sure how long it will take to fix.

Crews will continue the repair after 7pm to limit the disruption to peak hour traffic.

It expected service to be restored around midnight.

Kent and Cambridge Terraces, Courtney Place, Pirie Street, Brougham Street and parts of Hataitai and Roseneath may be affected by low or no service.

Businesses and residents are being advised to put some water aside in case a full water shutdown is needed.

It said the risk of a shutdown widening has reduced, but is still encouraging residents to store water just in case.

If one does occur, water tankers will be deployed to affected areas.

Motorists should expect some delays near the Basin with some lanes on Kent and Cambridge Terrace closed.

Drivers going to the airport are being warned to go the coastal route through Oriental Bay.

There will likely be water outages on Courtenay Place, Kent Terrace, Cambridge Terrace and properties around the suburbs of Mount Victoria, Roseneath and Hataitai.

And all of Hay Street and Telford Terrace off Oriental Parade, about 60 properties, will also likely be without water until after midday on Wednesday, due to a seperate outage.

Wellington Water's head of operations and engineering Tim Harty told Midday Report they were struggling to isolate the break because of broken valves.

The repair team was moving through the network, shutting valves to try and stop water flowing into the broken area, but some valves were not operating correctly, making the shut-down area larger than expected.

The full extent of the outages was not yet known, and people in the central city should ring and let Wellington Water know if they lose water.

"Until we get the pipe shut down, we can't get in there and do the repair."

He said the pipe was part of ageing infrastructure.

"Ideally we'd have liked to have gone in there and turned the valves on either side of the break off, isolated the break, and we could have gone straight into the repair, and it just hasn't happened that way."

"So we've just got to keep methodically moving through the system until we can do that."

He said once the extent of the outage was known, they would be sending water tankers out to neighbourhoods.

Contractors were at the scene before 5am on Wednesday, and commuters were warned to take care in the area.

Water was earlier covering nearly three lanes of Kent Terrace and parts of Cambridge Terrace.

One cyclist told RNZ she became stuck in silt from the flooding on her way to work.

"I didn't see the sign, there was no sign to see it and I just thought I was going left instead of straight ahead.

"Fortunately there was someone there to help me get out of it and they were very helpful."

One Wellington man told RNZ he was unfazed by the major pipe burst because of how frequently it happened.

A worker in the area, named Sheridan, said there had been a whole bunch of leaks around the Kent Terrace area.

"One towards the lights there, one on Vivian Street that was leaking for many many months and now this one. I mean it's no surprise really, it's been going on for awhile especially with the closing of the turning bays and everything, so every change just keeps making it worse," Sheridan said.

Across the street from the leak is the Honda store where Wellington branch manager Nick Devereux said thankfully the burst never affected the business and he only had a couple of disgruntled customers.

"Obviously there was a bit of a river down the street but the traffic management was there sorting it all out. Essentially it was business as usual, we had quite a few appointments, none of them were cancelled because of it so it was relatively easy," Devereux said.