Reflecting on the 1998 Sydney Water Crisis

The Sydney Morning Herald of Tuesday 4 August 1998 is one that the NSW water sector should not forget any time soon. This was just one day’s reporting during what became known as the Sydney Water Crisis and featured on-and-off boil water alerts throughout August and most of September that year.

?I found this copy of the newspaper yesterday, when I was invited to rummage through boxes of archives collected during an extensive career in the global water industry by Keith Stallard . I brought home a lot of important historic water documents and I might share some more later, but this newspaper is a good place to start.

?The Sydney Water Crisis saturates this issue of the paper, including front page headlines, a mention in Column 8, a full two-page spread (pages 6 & 7), the Opinion and Letters page (page 14), a full-page advertisement from Sydney Water, and even the more light-hearted back page ‘Stay in Touch’. All the regular cartoonists of the time get a shot at it, including Moir, Tandberg, Rocco, Sommerville and Wilcox.

?Let’s start with the front-page headline ‘Bungled from Day One’. The big exposé is that Sydney Water are revealed to have not been ‘up front’ with the community regarding a water quality incident involving detections of the parasites giardia and cryptosporidium. This includes delays in informing the community about detected contamination and then incorrect information shared about remediation.

?The sense of a ‘cover-up’ grows at is it revealed the appointed Chair of an announced inquiry to the incident (the Chair of the NSW EPA) had subsequently been removed from that role by the NSW Government. His removal is reported to be due to questions about his impartiality, having previously been “chairman of Sydney Water Board during early tendering for four private filtration plants”, one of which was central to the incident.

?The sense of ‘distrust’ is further compounded by the implication of political appointments to the Sydney Water Board, most notably Chair David Hill. As journalist Paul Sheehan put it on page 6, 'Being appointed chairman of the board was meant to be a $70,000-a-year executive plum for Mr Hill as he prepared to run for Parliament in the coming Federal election'. Ouch!

?By page 7, the focus shifts to the impact of the crisis to Sydney Water customers, and particularly the financial impacts to businesses.

?The crisis dominates the letters page with lots of mixed views. For mine, Eddie Clynes from Petersham makes a strong point. And the Opinion column is predictably scathing in asking ‘who’s responsible?’. ?

?In the meantime, Sydney Water publish a full-page advertisement, effectively cancelling the ‘boil water alert’ -which had previously been called by NSW Health- for many Sydney suburbs. This ultimately added to the sense of debacle since boil water alerts were called and rescinded three times during the prolonged crisis. Tensions between Sydney Water and NSW Health were widely reported.

?By the back page, readers are being asked if they are 'sick to death of the constant drip drip drip of the water crisis?’. Unfortunately, this was only just the start with the crisis -and the headlines- continuing another 6 weeks, until 19 September.

?So what were the long-term outcomes from this experience? Obviously, Sydney Water’s customer reputation took a big hit, -which I suspect took a good 20 years to recover from. And I think it was this event, which established a habit for many Sydneysiders to purchase and consume bottled water at home, -that’s obviously tragic. But there were also some very positive long-term outcomes.

? It is no exaggeration to say that the Sydney Water Crisis was instrumental in changing the way we think about water quality and safety, -not just in Australia but internationally. Both the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines and the World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality underwent major revisions, heavily informed by this incident as well as some similar international case studies. This led to a much stronger focus on risk assessment and risk management, which underpins drinking water quality management today.

?There were scientific developments too. For example, it was widely noted that the concentrations of cryptosporidium and giardia that were being detected in Sydney’s drinking water should have produced a major outbreak of illness (characterised by vomiting, abdominal pain and watery diarrhea). While many people attribute a personal or family illness to the incident, data from NSW Health "suggest that there was no measurable increase in disease attributable to drinking Sydney water ".

?As you can read from a story on page 6, contemporary methods for detecting cryptosporidium were unable to 'distinguish between different species of the parasite, nor whether the oocytes are alive or dead'. This is now widely believed to have been the key factor that explains the mismatch between the high detections in drinking water and the lack of an observable outbreak.

?That is, the cryptosporidium organisms that were detected, were likely of a strain that were not significantly infective to humans. There are other competing theories (including flawed laboratory analysis), but they look much less convincing with hindsight. Modern methods (including PCR) can now effectively discriminate between human-infective strains of cryptosporidium and non-human-infective strains.

Finally, I believe I would be correct in saying that the organisation that is Sydney Water has undergone major culture change during the last 25 years. The organisation-wide focus on protection of public health as primary responsibility has been elevated and the regard for open and transparent communication with the community is now highly evident. The organisation's 'commitment to customer engagement' is now a clear source of pride. That commitment is to an almost nauseating degree if you ask me, but perhaps that’s just what is needed to recover from the horror year that was 1998!