My final solution to this turned out quite nicely, and I hope this will be of some use to other people. I extended the DB adaptor for the db object I was using to contain automatic try/catch error reporting. Here's snippets of the relevant code

[PHP]
class NC_Db_Adaptor extends Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Mysql {

/**
* Wrapper function for query function to allow for nicer debugging
*
* @param string|Zend_Db_Select $sql The SQL statement with placeholders.
* @param array $bind An array of data to bind to the placeholders.
* @return Zend_Db_Pdo_Statement
* @throws Exception To re-throw PDOException.
*/
public function query($sql, $bind = array()) {
try {
return parent::query($sql, $bind);
} catch (Exception $e) {
//check if website is live or local. if live, email and supress error, if
//local then spit out error message including the sql and bind params

throw new Exception($e);
}
}
}
[/PHP]

Hope some people find this useful