Sewerage

Yes poo.

Since joining council I have learnt a lot. I can tell you the direct route sewerage takes from our place all the way to the treatment plant. Impressive eh? Maybe not. Learning about the sewer has been important. Why? Because the Sheffield sewerage system has many problems and to fix it you need to understand a bit of how it works.

Problems include:

A poorly built plant (in arbitration over this one).
Cracked pipes in town allowing groundwater to enter the sewer system (overwhelming the plant)
Secondary effluent flowing into a private landowners dam.

We need to fix this problem. We have recently had a consultant lay some future options before us. These include:
Upgrade the sewer plant (improve the effluent quality) then pump it to the Dasher River.
Upgrade the sewer plant (improve the effluent quality) then pump it to the Dodder Rivulet
Upgrade the sewer plant (improve the effluent quality) then re-use it on a farm to grow pasture and trees.

Given water scarceness increasing I have been pushing hard for the re-use option. Council will need to vote on this soon. I hope they vote for the re-use option.

Tony Coates contracts to Council and has done a very good job with a substandard plant. He has improved it's output considerably.

Now where do we find the millions of dollars to upgrade? Water and sewerage will no longer be council's direct responsibility after July 1 2009. It is up to us to set the future direction now.