Contractors working into the night to fix a drinking water pipe that burst on Thorndon Quay earlier on Tuesday, 29 April 2025. Photo: RNZ/Kelvin Anthony
A burst pipe on Thorndon Quay has frustrated a business group who had previously warned that putting a cycleway on top of ageing pipes was a bad idea.
On Tuesday evening, a drinking water pipe burst near 186 Thorndon Quay.
Wellington Water said the pipe that burst was a 150mm asbestos pipe that was installed in 1966.
"Given its location at the boundary between the road and the cycle lane, the pipe burst caused the road and cycle lane to lift and break," a Wellington Water spokesperson said.
Wellington City Council is currently upgrading Thorndon Quay. The upgrades include two new peak hour bus lanes and a two way cycle path.
But the Thorndon Quay Collective, which comprised of businesses in the area, had previously expressed concern that the new cycleway would end up being ripped up due to an ageing pipe network underneath.
Last year, Wellington Water has accidentally released a draft memo from 2022, suggesting a stretch of pipework under the road should have been fixed at the same time, which Thorndon Quay Collective chairperson Paul Robinson received under an Official Information Act request.
Robinson said Tuesday's outage was beyond frustrating when they had raised the issue of the state of the pipes and had been ignored.
"We're now confronted with a situation where just as the as the works are starting to come to an end we're back into road repairs in order to fix pipes."
Robinson said the water outage was had also impacted businesses along Thorndon Quay with several having to close because they had no water.
Wellington Water said the pipe that burst was a 150mm asbestos pipe that was installed in 1966. Photo: RNZ/Kelvin Anthony
A spokesperson for Wellington City Council said the pipes were typically easy to maintain.
"Current surfacing on Thorndon Quay provides easy access to pipes for maintenance and is simple to reinstate while continuing to provide a good surface for traffic," the spokesperson said.
They said the burst pipe was located under the bus lane.
The Wellington Water spokesperson fixing the burst pipe had taken longer than expected because other services such as power telecoms and gas that were also laid in the same trench directly above the water pipe.
"Our team had to carefully excavate the road to access the damaged section, while working around traffic islands and other obstacles."
The Wellington Water spokesperson said the pipe was not on the current list of priority pipes for renewal as there were other pipes in more urgent need of repair.
"Wellington Water's approach is based on asset condition, where we fix the critical pipes that have the most impact to the network and those which are prone to fail the most."
Meanwhile, Wellington Water says another water main has burst this evening and supply is cut to 32 homes in the suburb of Newlands.
It said the service will be interrupted for several hours at the households on Kinapori Terrace.
