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Water a major issue in SA elections
| I was delighted to hear Colin Pitman interviewed by Tony Eastley, as the lead item on ABC’s AM on Tuesday, about his work in detoxifying considerable quantities of stormwater being fed into Adelaide’s industrial water supply. |
AM was in Adelaide for three days in the run up to the South Australian election to be held on Saturday. And water as always in SA is up front in most electors’ minds.
The point of course is that practically all the water we drink is stormwater of some sort or another. Even in the best managed human excluded catchments, it runs in through all sorts of impurities like kangaroo/wombat/rabbit poo etc, and has to be purified before we drink it.
Pitman, who is city projects director with the City of Salisbury in Adelaide, outlined in Earthmover and Civil Contractor about two years ago (December 2007) - and at the CCF conference in Alice Springs in November 2007 - how he hoped to double output by 2010, to a recycled water yield of more than 20,000ML a year through 320ha of wetlands the City had established.
After being treated in the wetlands, the water flows into 9 aquifers where it is disinfected further, to at least the standard of water coming out of above ground dams.
This week in response to an email, he said that they were “on track to achieve 15GL” or 15,000ML of purified water this year, obviously not quite what he had hoped for 28 months ago.
If the Liberal party gets into power in Adelaide on Saturday, Stirling’s water will likely flow into the city’s drinking supplies, rather than just be used industrially. At least that is what the party is promising.
Meanwhile the incumbent Labor Party is insisting, almost hysterically through its environment minister Jay Weatherill, that the science “is not there yet” to allow us to actually drink treated stormwater.
One has to wonder where she’s been. I was living in Sydney about 15 years ago when there was real hysteria with Sydney Water’s tap product, due to cryptosporidium and other nasties escaping the purification process. Cryptosporidium is one of the most common waterborne diseases and is found worldwide.
At the time I talked to a doctor who had lived near Swan Hill on the Murray River for years, and he said people up and down our major river, had been ingesting cryptosporidium infected water for years without any major ill effects.
