Case Study: How Portable Desalination Units Transformed Water Resilience in Tairāwhiti, New Zealand

When Cyclone Gabrielle tore through the Tairāwhiti region in 2023, it didn’t just topple trees and inundate roads. It ruptured the region’s main 40-kilometre water pipeline and left 38,000 people staring down the barrel of a drinking-water crisis. Communities were cut off, some for days. Marae became emergency hubs overnight, but they were running on empty. No reliable water, no quick fix, and no backup plan.

That moment forced a rethink: if one pipe could bring a region to its knees, then each community needed the ability to produce its own water on demand. Out of this urgent need emerged one of Aotearoa’s most forward-thinking resilience projects. A partnership between Tairāwhiti Civil Defence, local iwi, and Australian engineering firm LEDI.

A Collaboration Built on Local Leadership and Practical Innovation

The project took shape quickly. Ben Green, Tairāwhiti’s Emergency Management Group Manager, worked with Ngāti Porou, community leaders, and LEDI founder Dael Liddicoat to design a solution that would actually work in the East Coast’s rugged, isolated conditions. Both men had military backgrounds, which sped up the translation of “concept” into “operational kit.”

Key constraints shaped the engineering:

• Light enough to throw into a Hilux or sling-load under a helicopter.

• Tough enough for brackish river mouths, muddy floodwater, or the Pacific Ocean itself.

• Simple enough for anyone at a marae to run under stress.

• Efficient enough to operate off solar-battery systems during power outages.

With no suitable technology available domestically, LEDI’s portable desalination prototype stood out. TEMO bought the first six units for large community hubs. Ngāti Porou’s environmental arm then stepped in, purchasing an additional 15 to cover remote hapū. LEDI embedded itself on the ground, running hands-on “train-the-trainer” workshops so local whānau could lead their own water response.

By the end of 2024, 21 units were in place across the region. By 2025, the network grew to 30. The most extensive deployment of community-level portable water purification systems anywhere in New Zealand.

A Distributed Water Network Hidden in Plain Sight

Each unit sits pre-positioned at a marae, usually inside its emergency container alongside first-aid kits, solar generators, and comms gear. In an outage, a trained operator pulls it out, drops a hose into any available water source, and produces safe drinking water within minutes.

LEDI’s AquaGen system delivers around 90 litres of water per hour from seawater and up to 200 litres per hour from cleaner supplies, roughly 2,000+ litres per day. That’s enough drinking water for a community of about 300 people from a device the size of an esky.

For larger population centres, LEDI supplied a heavier-duty model, the Garrison, a 1,000-litre-per-hour desalination system that can fit on the back of a hilux ute. It’s portable, solar-compatible, and powerful enough to supply several thousand people a day. During demonstrations at Gisborne’s port, it turned harbour seawater into drinking water in real time for government officials and emergency management leaders. A simple but profound proof of capability.

Tairāwhiti now holds more portable, disaster-ready water capacity than the rest of the country combined, with distribution of the purified water handled by Covertex.

Technology Built for Reality, Not Brochures

LEDI’s systems succeeded in Tairāwhiti for one reason: they were engineered for what the region actually experiences.  Isolation, power failures, and unpredictable water quality.

Portable and rugged:

Every AquaGen unit is housed in a military-grade case with a hardened pre-filtration system. Teams literally toss them into ute trays or helicopter baskets.

Simple push-button operation:

Instructions are printed inside the lid. No guesswork. No specialist operators.

Off-grid power ready:

They run on 12–24V DC, meaning solar arrays, vehicle batteries, or small generators can power them. Internal batteries provide short-term operation even if everything else fails.

Local training and ownership:

Instead of dropping hardware and leaving, LEDI trained local operators, built spare-parts kits, and integrated the units into community emergency plans. Marae now conduct periodic drills to keep capability sharp.

The result is a distributed water network that continues functioning even when the centralised one doesn’t.

Immediate Impact and Long-Term Payoff

The transformation is tangible. Communities that once relied on rain tanks and ageing rural water schemes now have a safety valve. When supplies run dry or become contaminated, a marae can simply make more water.

In a disaster scenario, the benefits multiply:

• No more flying in pallets of bottled water.

• No more days-long isolation for remote settlements.

• No more dependence on a single point of failure.

Ben Green summed up the shift succinctly: Tairāwhiti will never again come that close to running out of safe drinking water. The region now has options. Fast, local, sustainable options.

The national response has been loud. The project won ALGIM’s Smart Communities Project of the Year in late 2025. TVNZ’s 1News called LEDI’s systems “first-of-their-kind filtration units” capable of supporting 10,000 people a day in a major emergency when scaled across multiple sites. The New Zealand Water Review highlighted the approach as a model for remote and disaster-prone communities nationwide.

A Blueprint for the Pacific and Beyond

The Tairāwhiti deployment demonstrates something simple but powerful: decentralised, community-controlled water production works. It’s fast. It’s cost-effective. It’s scalable. And in a crisis, it’s orders of magnitude more efficient than shipping plastic bottles by the tonne.

LEDI’s founder has already argued for broader adoption, particularly in Pacific nations that face cyclones, tsunamis, and fragile water infrastructure. Instead of staging bottled water in warehouses, agencies could cache desalination units, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.

Tairāwhiti proved the model. Other regions now have a playbook built from real-world results.

What This Means for Emergency Management

If you strip away the headlines, this project is a case study in modern resilience thinking: don’t wait for the system to break, give communities the tools they need to stand on their own feet.

LEDI didn’t claim resilience. It delivered it.

The marae of Tairāwhiti, once left vulnerable by a 40-kilometre pipe failure, now stand prepared for the next storm. And the one after that. Their taps will stay running, come hell or high water.