A thank you to ACTEW

ActewAGL has KPI’s for sewer and water work. from memory it goes like this.

Sewer blockages must be flowing within 5 hours.
If it is overflowing inside the house it is 1 hour.

Bad Water leaks (bursts) have 5 hours to have the water back on.

Small water leaks are 7 days.

These times are to have the assett working again. this does not include restoration or if they need to come back and replace pipes ect….just to get it working again.

Staff get a percentage of the business profits at the end of the financial year if the KPI’s were met. Form memory sewer KPI’s needed to be at 99% and water was around 95%. each percentage point under the KPI would dip into their bonus. Now you know why they want to get the job done.

ActewAGL People, not ACTEW. They are different things.

I couldn’t see an ACTEW executive out the back of your place cleaning the sewer with a shovel.

Quite by chance I received a “dear resident” letter in the mail yesterday from ACTEW stating that they are conducting sewer pipe clearances in our neighbourhood over the next couple of weeks, so they might need access to our property blah blah blah.

Hmmm, maybe they’ve noticed there is quite a problem existing over the town and actually being proactive?!

ACTEW are generally pretty good with fixing problems with leaking water/sewerage quickly. Though the cause of the problem last time we had to call them was ACTEW flushing the sewerage pipes and missing one causing on drain to overflow. Fixed within hours of reporting though.

Semi related: A small item on ABC radio news yesterday has ACTEW handing responsibility for maintenance of electricity power lines on private (rural) properties to the landowners. Apparently means they can escape blame if the wires break/cause fires etc.

I expect that maintenance would have to be contracted out by the landowner to ACTEW, as no landholder would be allowed to meddle with the lines. Nice buck passing, ACTEW.

ant said :

I figure they respond so fast to these because having a Cholera outbreak in Canberra would be tres embarassing.

and they would be in the sh!t…

oh, come on. I had to say it…

I figure they respond so fast to these because having a Cholera outbreak in Canberra would be tres embarassing.

Whoopdeedoo

I’m glad they were speedy for you…i unfortunately had a bad experience with them and the ACT Government and funnily enough they all didn’t get working until i started talking about compensation!

One evening we had our garage flood and it destroyed many things such as tools and two new bathroom cabinets we had just bought as we were about to get our bathrooms done. So there i was with my husband and neighbours bucketing the water out of our garage as the rain would not stop…i had only had a cesarean 4 weeks prior. The plumbers came with their eel and checked our pipes, only pulled out a few little roots so they dug up where our pipes meet the mains and the mains were so blocked it was disgusting. But as it is not sewerage they don’t classify it as an emergency.

So nearly 2 months later, five floodings and numerous phone calls, it was finally fixed.

So to sum it all up…i’m not a big fan of Actew…and really hate having to pay them all this money when the bills come in!

grump said :

be thankful it overflowed out the lid and not back into your house as happened to 2 of my neighbours mid to late last year – the second one it happended to when they came round to clean the pipes the day after – blew it all in to his place. $60000+ for the 2 of them in insurance and damages

When I first walked into the house I thought that had happened as they did manage to fill the house with a rather nasty smell which took me many hours to get rid of. Thank God it was only the smell.