The Lake Dunstan Water Supply Scheme will be officially blessed and opened this week at Clyde.
A special ceremony will be held on Thursday (22 June) at 10.30am at the treatment plant site.
Over the past few weeks, the new water supply for Clyde and Alexandra has moved through the transition phase from the old system to the new, and people have been enjoying a new and improved water supply that also meets the new NZ Drinking Water Standards, Central Otago District Council Programme Manager Patrick Keenan said.
“We had our first sip of the water a few weeks ago, and now it’s time to bring the wider community together to celebrate this occasion, with an official opening and blessing.”
Residents are already noticing a refreshing difference. One of them is Sue Russell of Eat Humble Pie café in Alexandra.
“I turn on my tap and lovely cold, refreshing, clean water comes out now.”
Later this year in spring, when the weather starts to warm up, the Council will be holding a public open day for the Lake Dunstan Water Supply, offering a great opportunity to share information with the community around how the treatment plant works to supply reliable and safe water.
People can follow this link to register their interest and keep updated on when the dates for the public open day are set.
For more about the project go to our page: infrastructure project update.
Pump station projects completed
The Lake Dunstan project is not the only one to have recently reached completion: the Dunorling Street pump station near the boat ramp in Alexandra, has just been finished.
In the past two years, Council has been increasing its emergency storage capacity, beginning with the pumpstation emergency storage units at the Linger and Die Reserve, which have been in use for the past 10 months, with Fulton and Hogan installing a similar emergency storage unit at Dunorling Street. This pump station takes wastewater from the entire Alexandra and Clyde network (including the Linger and Die Reserve pump station) and pumps it to the Alexandra Wastewater Treatment Plant. The emergency storage units ensure that we have storage capacity within the stations during any unplanned outages.
Prior to the installation of the storage unit, if the pump station went fully offline, there was only approximately a one-hour response time before wastewater would flow into the Clutha River/Mata-Au. However, the Dunorling Street storage unit increases the response time to eight hours, thus adding further resilience to the wastewater network. Additionally, this capability adds another layer of safety to perform maintenance works at the pump station and downstream at the Alexandra Treatment Plant by redirecting the wastewater to the emergency storage unit when necessary.
Pictured below, the Dunorling Street storage unit construction, consisting of 17 reinforced concrete sections. The tank itself is 25m long x 3m wide x 2m high. The whole unit can contain up to 150 cubic metres of wastewater.
