Waterproofing Northern Adelaide
Northern Adelaide Plains
Total funding: $90.2 with $38 million from the Australian Government plus GST and $22.1 million from Local Government, $31.7 million from State Government, and $14.4 million private funding.
About the project
The project will provide infrastructure to integrate stormwater, groundwater, wastewater and drinking water systems in the Northern Adelaide Plains region.
The project involves:
- capture and cleansing of stormwater in urban wetlands, aquifer storage and recovery and distribution of water for the irrigation of public spaces and industrial use
- an aquifer storage, treatment and recovery trial will be undertaken by CSIRO to determine optimum practices of storage and recovery to treat water to drinking water quality standards
- trialing of a system to utilise domestic rainwater tanks to harvest water and release for public reuse, and
- hydrological modelling to predict the annual average runoff from regional catchments to enhance regional water management.
Project outcomes and benefits
Through the project, 12.1 gigalitres per year of drinking water currently used for industrial and urban irrigation will be replaced with treated stormwater drawn from the Northern Adelaide Plains aquifer. This will reduce the regions dependence on drinking water by 6%. The project will also substitute 1.2 gigalitres per year of water currently sourced from stressed groundwater systems and recharge five gigalitres per year to local overused and overallocated aquifers. Specifically, the additional recharge to aquifers will return the Penrice, Virginia and Waterloo corner areas of groundwater drawdown to sustainable levels. The reuse of stormwater will reduce ocean outfall through Barker Inlet by 20 gigalitres per year, and reduce pollutants entering the ocean by 40 tonnes a year. This will help preserve ocean ecosystems including fragile seagrass communities. Improved water supply will also encourage growth of industries and communities.
The project advances the National Water Initiative objective of encouraging innovation in water supply.
Progress to July 2008
The project has established three wetland aquifer storage and recovery schemes in urban areas of Northern Adelaide, installed infrastructure for a study to investigate the treatment of recycled stormwater to drinking water standards, and injected cleansed stormwater to improve the condition of the stressed aquifer below the Northern Adelaide Plains.
Water Smart Australia projects are funded by the Australian Government's framework, Water for the Future.
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