Ask Nicole Ahotaha to show you her travel photos and you might get more than you bargained for.

Alongside the standard family shots and landmarks, there’s sure to be plenty of hydrant lids, manholes and a dam or two.

Nicole is an operations engineer in the water networks team – a job she loves, and never fully turns her back on.

On a recent family holiday in Japan, her family wanted to visit a statue of three kids from the ‘Attack on Titan’ anime tv series and comics. Nicole herself wasn’t so fussed – until she realised where it was.

“When I found out it was in Hita, by the Oyama Dam, I said: ‘You can go and look at the statue, I’ll be looking at the dam.”

While she was always interested in understanding how things work, she says engineering “wasn’t really on my radar as a kid”.

“At high school I took physics and calculus, because I enjoyed numbers and problem solving. When I finished high school, I was thinking I’d study architecture, but I took a last-minute leap into civil engineering.”

Photo: Nicole is at home when she's out in the field.

Nicole particularly enjoys opportunities to get out on site and learn from the crews who carry out repairs.

There’s also an element of detective work in being a water network operations engineer.

Nicole recalls a time when the Bombay water storage reservoir’s levels were dropping more quickly than normal, and she hit the streets to get to the bottom of it.

“The outflows were up by about a litre a second – which is big in Bombay, where we have only a small network,” she says. “We knew there was a leak, but not where it was. In the end we walked up and down Portsmouth Rd, listening to the valves and meters.

“We checked one meter and it was roaring – it turned out the customer had a leak in their own water pipe. Luckily the customer turned up – they had been trying to arrange a plumber, but we had to stress how important it was since by that point we were tankering water to top up the reservoir.

“I do like to find an issue and resolve it. It’s always a good feeling.”

Part of the job also involves reviewing plans for network shutdowns, which are needed to facilitate new connections or maintenance.

“We need to check that key customers like schools and major water users have been identified, and that we’ve been in touch with any registered dialysis patients to let them know of the shutdown and encourage them to make alternative plans if they need to.

“We also need to check if shutting off that section of watermain could have a wider impact on the network.”

Photo: She's developed a passion for leak detection.

She likes the chance to meet customers. “I remember one elderly lady who had a watermain break in front of her house. Her garage had flooded, and some of her garden bark had washed away.

“Customer liaison officer Ina Sa’u and I cleared up some of the bark and put it back in the garden. She was really grateful. The reception you get from customers when you’ve helped them out is one of the great parts of the job.

On the other hand, sometimes customers can be angry or frustrated.

“In these cases, you just have to de-escalate. I do understand where they’re coming from, so we just have to explain what we’re doing and why. Most of the time people are happy that someone has taken the time to come out and talk to them,” Nicole says.

The job quenches Nicole’s thirst for learning; She’s almost mastered acoustic leak detection and has even been dabbling with water divining – a practice for locating underground water that dates back to the 1500s. Also known as ‘dowsing’, it involves walking around with a pair of metal rods or a bent piece of wire – to see if the rods or wire dips, twitches or crosses over. It’s widely disputed by scientists, but around the world there are water diviners who swear by it – many with convincing success stories. Nicole is currently using a coathanger.

No two days are the same, but most are really rewarding, she says.

“The people I work with are really passionate about what they do. And the work we do is important. Everyone needs water, so being able to help in providing people with safe, reliable drinking water is really cool.

“And it’s fun. In operations, there’s always something different happening.”

Outside of work, Nicole loves travelling, and spending time with her friends and family – preferably a combination of the two.

In fact, she’s just come home from a trip with her siblings to Las Vegas – and yes, a visit to the famous Hoover Dam was high on the to-do list.