Turning innovation into impact, Hurunui District Council has earned national recognition for transforming how it delivers safe drinking water to its rural communities.

Hurunui District Council won the prestigious "Excellence in Water Project" Award at last week’s Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia (IPWEA) Excellence Awards for its work in water safety protozoa compliance.

Hurunui District Council Chief Operations officer Dan Harris said in 2014 Council was faced with the problem of knowing there were changes to drinking water regulations on the horizon. These included new National Standards requiring all drinking water supplies to have an effective protozoa barrier.

“These changes were unaffordable for our smaller supplies,” Harris said. “At the time, Council had a few protozoa barriers in place, but none that would stand up to today’s standards.”

Community buy-in was essential for the project, Harris said.

“We consulted our community in 2015 and agreed to implement a district-wide equitable rating system for all drinking water supplies. This combined all finances for all but one of our 20 schemes.”

The ambitious project would require upgrades to 16 water treatment plants.

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“It was clear Council needed to take a new course. Continuing with external technical expertise would have been too expensive and we’d be competing with larger metro councils for these experts due to the legislative changes. There was also the feeling that to truly master our water management that skillset needed to remain in-house,” Harris said.

Taking a highly contentious step, Council decided to chlorinate all supplies.

“This was as a result of reoccurring E. Coli transgressions expected of networks the size and scale of ours. This 2017 action began the rapid decline of very high transgression counts to zero in 2019 and, since then, Council has not experienced a single confirmed result since.”

An in-house programme management office was established to oversee the design, construction and operation of the water treatment plant upgrade project to save costs.

The upgrade project achieved enhanced water quality, especially for the district’s smaller communities, which had previously been subject to intermittent or permanent boil water notices.

As part of this work, a wide array of resilience improvements was made. These included:

• Removing The Peaks and Upper Waitohi systems which were unreliable, and merging into the high quality water from Bishells Road, forming the new Waikari Basin scheme
• introducing four new water sources, two of which cater for growth in the Amberley area
• increased automation to allow plants to be automatically shut down, and settings to be modified or plants restarted remotely
• establishing dual and sometimes triple communications with plants (digital radio network, ethernet over radio and in some cases cellular communications)
• creating in-built storage resilience, with all plants now having onsite storage (0.5 – 3.0 million litres) and at least two pumps.

“This was so much more than a technical exercise swapping out old treatment plants,” Harris said.

The winners have been the around 18,000 residents connected to Council’s water supplies.

Hurunui Mayor Marie Black said the project has made a real difference to the district’s rural communities.

“It has been possible to lift boil water notices, some of which had been in place for many years. I’m incredibly proud of the team in setting the direction to deliver safe drinking water to our communities in a manner that required innovation and creative thinking.”

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