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Source: ONE News -
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If you're only as strong as your weakest link, the New Zealand economy has this week been made to look rather feeble.
Poor old Auckland gym bunnies having to endure a cold shower at Les Mills can hardly be considered third world conditions.
But it's something else entirely when an eight centimetre rupture in the Maui gas pipeline forces suppliers to our biggest company, Fonterra, to dump their product and effectively pour $20 million down the drain every day.
And it's something else when hospitals have to start telling patients it's BYO linen; when manufacturers start to fret about not being able to supply their customers and workers can't get on with their jobs for want of a gas supply.
Granted it's been in place 30 years apparently without incident, but you can't help but wonder why we are so reliant on one pipeline just 70 centimetres in diameter.
Were we not asking similar questions about the security of our power supply a few years back, when Auckland was found to be at the mercy of an equipment failure at a Transpower substation?
It's a valid question. But is having a standby back up option a realistic answer?
The chief executive of the Council of Infrastructure Development Stephen Selwood told Close Up this week that "having another pipeline that you actually don't need 99-percent of the time...that's a huge cost...sometimes we might be better to take the risk when things do go out and there is a cost and we're experiencing that right now in terms of the gas, but is that cheaper than maintaining that level of back up".
If it's unlikely it will be needed often, if ever, would you want to pay for a fully-fledged plan B?
The answer might be yes while the impact of a failure is being felt as acutely as it is now.
But if this hadn't happened and your power company had wanted to implement double-digit percentage increases for that very reason, I cannot imagine those whose budgets are already stretched would find it quite so necessary.
Vector, the listed company which operates the pipeline, says the cost of having a backup would be prohibitive for both consumers and the industry.
You only need to reference just how concerned lobby groups have been over potential price hikes if the four state-owned energy companies are part-privatised if National wins November's election - to know consumers would not want to stomach a price hike.
There is no doubt that system failures like this one are expensive, harmful to businesses, harmful to our economy and unpopular.
But you could equally say the same of exorbitant power price hikes.
What we have to decide is whether we'd rather pay the price now and remove the risk, or tolerate the risk and potentially pay later if systems fail.
But perhaps there is another lesson here.
It was less than nine months ago our second biggest city endured a devastating earthquake.
If that taught us nothing else, surely it provided a harrowing lesson in the need to be prepared.
If we're not willing to pay for our infrastructure systems to have a plan B, then whoever relies on that system needs to have a back up plan of their own.
Read more Nadine Chalmers-Ross opinion
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Post new commentPappy said on 2011-10-30 @ 15:05 NZDT: Report abusive post
Given that nothing is permanent, Vector might have a Plan C, which would be the ability to install a temporary by-pass. It might mean investing in necessary technology, but a $20 million a day penalty might be a good incentive, if they could be made accountable.