Understanding the Water Irrigation Restriction Table

Site name: This is the site where the flow in the waterway is measured, for example, Ashburton River at State highway one. Your consent will specify which site your consent is tied to.

Flow Assessment: This is the current flow assessment for the relevant minimum flow site. This information may be obtained from telemetered river flow sites, river flow gaugings or assessments carried out by staff in the field, or in some situations, calculated flows. It is this flow that is used to set restrictions on the abstractions of water, where required.

Restriction Group: Many waterways have consents with different restriction levels. Consents with the same restriction information are put into groups or bands. To find out which group your consent comes under, click on the site name and a list of all the consents under each group will appear.

Trigger Level:  The trigger level is the flow at which a restriction will apply. For example if a water take is required to cease when the river flow drops below 5.0 m3/s the trigger level will be 5.0 m3/s. Where a consent requires the take to reduce in steps as the flow drops, the trigger level displayed will be the flow at which the next reduction will occur.

Restriction Applied:  The flow assessment figure is used to determine what, if any, restriction on the taking of water is to be applied. This may be a percentage reduction in the rate or volume of the take, or a requirement to cease abstraction altogether. In situations where a water user group has been formed, users may go onto roster to share the available water. Surface water takes are generally required to reduce their rate of take when subject to a percentage restriction on allocation, whereas groundwater consents are restricted on volume. You should check the specific details of your consent to confirm this.

Tomorrows Flow & Tomorrows Restriction: River flow and restriction information for the following day will usually become available between 4:00 pm and 9:00 pm the evening before. The flow and restriction information in these columns will become Todays Flow and Todays Restrictions at midnight.  A dash "-" in this column indicates that the flow data is not yet available.

Other things that you should know:
There are only two sources of information that are to be used for water abstraction restriction purposes, the water abstraction restriction web page and the low flow information on the Environment Canterbury River Report info line (083)22 55 22. The following information is not to be used for restriction purposes:

• Environment Canterbury’s river flow web page of river plots or tables of flow data.  It is raw data and may contain inaccuracies.
• Newspaper river flow information is a day old and the information is sourced from Environment Canterbury’s raw data on Ecan’s website which may contain inaccuracies. 
• RIVER TXT Phone information is based on the same raw data and may contain inaccuracies.

It is the consent holders responsibility to understand the minimum flow conditions imposed under their consent(s). If you are in doubt about which restrictions apply to your consent(s), you should refer to your consent document for clarification, or contact the Environmental Protection Section of Environment Canterbury prior to commencing irrigation.