Waterproofing Northern Adelaide
Northern Adelaide Plains
Australian Government Funding: $38,000,000
About the project
The project has provided infrastructure to integrate storm water, groundwater, wastewater and drinking water systems in the Northern Adelaide Plains region. 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 storm water to drinking water standards, and injected cleansed storm water to improve the condition of the stressed aquifer below the Northern Adelaide Plains.
The project involved:
- the capture and cleansing of storm water 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 a system to utilise domestic rainwater tanks to harvest water and release for public reuse, and
- hydrological modeling to predict the annual average runoff from regional catchments to enhance regional water management.
Project benefits
Through the project, 12.1 gigalitres per year of drinking water currently used for industrial and urban irrigation has been replaced with treated storm water drawn from the Northern Adelaide Plains aquifer. This has reduced the regions dependence on drinking water by 6%. The project also has substituted 1.2 gigalitres per year of water currently sourced from stressed groundwater systems and recharged five gigalitres per year to local overused and over allocated aquifers. Specifically, the additional recharge to aquifers has returned the Penrice, Virginia and Waterloo corner areas of groundwater drawdown to sustainable levels. The reuse of storm water has reduced ocean outfall through Barker Inlet by 20 gigalitres per year, and reduced pollutants entering the ocean by 40 tonnes a year. This helps preserve ocean ecosystems including fragile seagrass communities. Improved water supply will also encourage growth of industries and communities.
Progress
This project is now complete. For more information, please see the Waterproofing Northern Adelaide fact sheet produced by the City of Tea Tree Gully.
Water Smart Australia projects are funded by the Australian Government's Water for the Future initiative.
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