PIPA and the Environment
Plastics Industry Pipe Association of Australia Ltd
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PIPA and the Environment
Plastics Industry Pipe Association of Australia Ltd
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Wimmera Mallee Pipeline One Year On
Mark Heathcote, December 2007 Piping inefficient channel systems is not a new phenomenon – the Darling Anabranch, Northern Mallee Scheme, Tungamah and the Harvey Water projects are a few examples. The Wimmera Mallee remains the largest scheme of its type but all have one thing in common – they are based on plastics pressure pipe systems. The Wimmera Mallee Pipeline Project is massive by any standards. It sees the replacement of around 17,500km of open channel with a pumped delivery system involving some 9000km of pressure pipe. The project is coming up for its first anniversary since construction began in late 2006 and continues to impress with the scale of its achievements. One year into this project and over 2200km of plastics pipeline is in the ground. The vast majority of pipe has been PVC in sizes up to 450mm diameter, whilst PE has been used for smaller diameter systems where coiled pipe and plough-in techniques can be employed. That’s equivalent to laying a continuous pipeline from Melbourne to Alice Springs in a year!!!
A significant milestone was reached on 12 October 2007 with water flowing through Supply System 1 and onto the towns of Antwerp, Dimboola, Dooen, Jeparit, Pimpinio, Rainbow, Tarranyurk and Yaapeet. In doing so it is not only saving water but providing critical drought relief to these areas. This project will save over 100 gigalitres of water every year. This amount of water is simply staggering – so staggering it’s hard to visualise. To help with this visualisation there is a good description by the SA Government Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation (www.dwlbc.sa.gov.au) which puts this into a more recognisable perspective. Mathematically a gigalitre is 1,000,000,000 litres - which doesn’t mean much to most of us so looking at it another way, 1 mega litre would fill a swimming pool 50 metres long and 20 metres wide and one metre deep. 1,000 of these swimming pools would equal 1 gigalitre. 1 gigalitre would cover the Adelaide Oval to a depth of 50 metres –that’s about the height of a 15 storey building. So when you have a project like the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline that saves 100 gigalitres a year that’s something to get excited about. While saving huge quantities of water and improving the environment are major positive outcomes, there is even more to it than that. In a recent interview with the Chairman of Anabranch Water and one of the driving forces behind the Darling Anabranch pipeline in NSW (another PVC pipe based water saving scheme), Keith Forster was keen to point out how projects like this change the way people think about water and ultimately how they use it as a resource. Security of supply and improved water quality will change the culture of water use among many rural users and in Keith’s words the advantages of the pipeline are only just beginning. The same no doubt will apply to the Wimmera Mallee.
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