Water Carrier Services
What you need to do to keep your drinking water safe if you transport water to consumers or another drinking water supplier.
Your responsibilities
You are deemed a water carrier service if you transport water from a drinking water supply to consumers or another drinking water supplier. As a water carrier service you must:
- Register your drinking water supply
- Provide safe drinking water and comply with current drinking water standards
- Complete a drinking water safety plan
- Identify and manage risks through drinking water safety planning
- keep your water carrying equipment well maintained, inspected and serviced by a suitably qualified person as part of your maintenance plan
- know how to use monitoring and treatment equipment to test the drinking water’s quality, particularly for every load at filling and delivery points
- have contamination and emergency response plans in place
- Notify Taumata Arowai if drinking water is unsafe or doesn’t comply with drinking water standards
Registration
Drinking water carriers who were registered with the Ministry of Health immediately before 15 November 2021 continue to be registered with Taumata Arowai. These carriers will need to set up an account in our online self-service portal Hinekōrako.
All water carriers that were unregistered immediately before 15 November 2021 must be registered by 15 November 2022, by completing this online form.
Once registered, you will need to renew your registration annually, and make updates as necessary. You are required to immediately notify Taumata Arowai when your registration details change – this can be done using Hinekōrako.
If you have your own water source, which is a body of water from which water is abstracted (like a river, lake, or aquifer) or rainwater, that is only used fill your water carrying trucks, you will need to first register that source as a drinking water supply. Your water carrying services can then be registered as a separate drinking water supply in Hinekōrako.
Drinking water safety planning
A drinking water safety plan is a comprehensive risk assessment and management tool that covers all parts of the drinking water supply from source water to consumers, including transport by a water carrier where that is part of a supply arrangement. It describes how risks relating to drinking water are identified, mitigated or managed, so that safe drinking water is always provided to consumers.
You must submit a drinking water safety plan to Taumata Arowai by 15 November 2022.
Some drinking water safety plans need to include a source water risk management plan. This only applies to drinking water supplies that have a ‘source’. Water carriers who obtain water from another drinking water supplier – e.g. a reticulated drinking water supply – will not need to include a source water risk management plan in their drinking water safety plan.
The source water risk management plan, if required as part of your drinking water safety plan, sets out:
- risks and hazards affecting the source water of a drinking water supply
- risk management treatments that will be used to address these risks
- a consideration of values identified by your relevant local authorities that relate to the freshwater body you access to provide water
- a description of agreed work your relevant local authority will carry out to address risks or hazards to your water source, on your behalf
Find out more about drinking water safety planning
Notify Taumata Arowai
You need to notify Taumata Arowai straight away in accordance with your registration conditions, for example if you cannot supply safe drinking water. This can happen if there has been an incident such as water contamination, an emergency, a significant change in your temporary drinking water supply or water testing results come back as non-compliant with drinking water standards.