As Australia’s population evolves, how will the water industry balance service level challenges with customer expectations? PWPro investigates.
It’s not something that people tend to think about much – the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of pipelines beneath the ground that bring water to us and take our sewerage away. These services are available 24/7 and taken for granted by most Australians.
While some of the largest cities in Australia had reticulated water and sewerage services during the early part of the last century, most communities received these essential services during the 1950s to 1970s. This suggests that a significant amount of water and sewerage infrastructure is more than 50–60 years old.
Not all are as old as this, but it raises questions as to whether there will be challenges ahead as infrastructure ages and requires additional maintenance, rehabilitation or replacement.
According to Cardno’s Asset Management Discipline Leader Aneurin Hughes, the useful life of pipelines will vary significantly depending on factors such as material, quality of construction and physical environment. Typically pipelines would last around 60 to 90 years. However, a small percentage will fail prematurely while others may well exist at 120 years of age. In fact, he praises the water industry for its conservatism when building these “essential services”.
“In water and sewerage networks, it’s the assets below the ground that probably account for 70–80 per cent of the asset value base,” he says. “So it’s what you can’t see that could be the problem.”
Regional reality
In his paper ‘Addressing Asset Management Challenges in Small Water Utilities’, Hughes turns the spotlight on smaller councils. It is the smaller councils that he believes are facing the bigger problem in regards to water infrastructure maintenance and repair.
The population is migrating to the cities, he explains in his paper. As at June 2012, 70 per cent of the population resided in Australia’s major cities. Just 2.3 per cent live in remote or very remote areas. Hughes interrogation of the data shows that 213 of Australia’s 542 local government serve populations of less than 7000 people.
“Small utilities are facing increasing challenges that become more pronounced as a result of population decline, ageing infrastructure, difficulty in attracting and retaining skilled staff and limited financial resources,” he writes in his conclusion.
North Burnett Council in Queensland is a good example of a smaller council facing the challenges Hughes outlined. The council jurisdiction is large in area, but small in population. It has seven water treatment plants for only 3300 connections and five sewage plants for 2300 connections.
The council’s oldest sewerage system is in Mundubbera and dates back to the 1940s, but the majority of infrastructure was built in the 1960s. The council is starting to experience a number of failures and is working to prioritise maintenance and replacement work, says North Burnett Regional Council Manager Technical Services Trevor Harvey.
“Typical of a lot of regional councils, until amalgamation occurred in 2008, we probably didn’t have enough local engineering expertise or enough funding behind us to do a lot of inspection work,” says Harvey. “We are starting
to ramp up our CCTV on our hot spots in the area's sewerage systems.”
Harvey and his team are faced with trying to predict the population requirements in 30 years’ time. One question they have to consider is whether the water sources will be acceptable under the predicted future guidelines for potable water.
North Burnett is part of a pilot project with five of its neighbouring councils in the Burnett area. The pilot group is investigating ways in which they can benefit from merging their contracts with contractors and suppliers. The approach already seems to be reaping rewards.
Passing on the message
Queensland moved to a new reporting process in 2006 to help water service providers convey the true state of water infrastructure to government. The Statewide Water Information Management (SWIM) project was created to simplify the reporting of upwards 900 indicators reported by some Queensland service providers.
Today, SWIMonline portal and data translation tools require the reporting of approximately 200 indicators in total, which are passed onto state and government agencies in the specified formats. While SWIM helps, it can still be a challenge for water service providers to convey the importance of infrastructure investment to councillors, says Harvey.
“I’d hate to be in the shoes of councillors in the next five to 10 years and put to them the option of reducing the quality of water produced by some systems and de-rating them to non-potable supplies,” says Harvey. “I think that is a very sad thing that some small communities may have to face.”
It is a question of looking at what customers are prepared to pay for water services and how that relates to service levels. Could there be a variable level of acceptable potable water within a state?
“We are seriously facing a decision for a community of 500 people where we’ve got to make the decision of whether to supply them with potable water or whether it would be better to supply them with a water tank. It’s a heck of a reduction in service.”
Customer demands
Levels of service is an issue that Unitywater Manager Strategic Infrastructure Planning, Matthew Bower, believes will be an important question for the industry in coming years.
Bower’s work currently focuses on investigating how to manage the network and prepare it for growth in the future. “A big part of my program over the next 24 months is looking at ways of deferring capital and capturing and managing it within the asset infrastructure as much as possible.”
Water consumption in Australia has changed over the past decade, he explains. Unitywater is designing infrastructure on the basis of 350 L/EP per day, whereas the current population base will probably use between 150-600 EP per day.
The knock-on effect is that reservoirs are being managed very differently to when they were first designed. In some cases, there is talk of taking some reservoirs offline. In addition, the management of pressure in the network is another way the organisation is managing its burst rate.
The key question for Bower is what is the right level of maintenance to reflect the right level of service standard for an affordable network for Unitywater customers.
“What service levels do we want? What’s appropriate for the level of cost they are investing in us? These are the challenges we want to look at because it could be ‘goldplating’,” says Bower. “Every utility is asking themselves that question.”
Educating the masses
The challenge for utilities is to educate their customers about the value of their investment in water services. Do they understand that spending $500 per quarter (about $5.50 per day, slightly more than a cup of coffee) on their water and sewerage translates to drinkable water and flushable toilets 24/7, 365 days a year?
“It’s very easy for me to understand what that means, but translating that for our customers to understand what that means for them is a real challenge, not just for Unitywater, but the industry as a whole,” says Bower.
Ageing infrastructure, it seems, is only one challenge for water service providers. Many face the challenge of meeting increasing or decreasing demands and the expectations of customers who desire these essential services at an affordable cost. Other challenges faced include the potential impacts
of climate change on the reliability of water sources (see AWA Water Sector survey infographic on page 24).
Communities large and small will be faced with determining what levels of service they are willing to pay for and whether they can really accept any change from existing levels. This will require better-informed customers who understand the costs involved in providing essential services and the costs associated with the various service levels.
Ultimately water and sewerage utilities are an essential public health provision to the community services. You only need to visit a developing country to fully understand their value.
Levels of Service
IPWEA has partnered with the Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government to produce its Levels of Service Practice Note. The practice note explores the challenges faced by organisations in working within a budget and communicating what is possible within that budget to the community at large. To purchase a copy of the practice note, visit i
pwea.org/practicenotes