Canberra - the latest recycled water battleground ...

Excerpt from the Australian:

City to push effluent uphill

21 July 2007

It was a very Canberra moment for a well-educated, politically astute group at a dinner party in one of the national capital's better suburbs.

The conversation had turned, as it often does these days, to the most basic civilised urban amenity: water and the lack thereof. Canberra, the garden capital, has only just been reprieved by recent heavy rain from level-four water restrictions, which mean no outside watering.

But because of successive years of restrictions, street trees are dying and European gardens are being ploughed up in favour of more ecologically acceptable rockeries and tan bark. Desperate times mean desperate measures. Last summer, Canberra started to pump water from the Murrumbidgee river.

Now the ACT's Stanhope Government has proposed drawing on federal funds to introduce recycled sewage into the ACT's potable supply. This would start at nine gigalitres, rising to 20GL or 40 per cent of the potable water, which, it's believed, would be the highest proportion of recycled sewage of any large city in the world.

So naturally someone asked the question, "Would you drink recycled sewage?"

"We would have," they replied in unison, "until we heard Peter Collignon on the radio."

Australian National University professor Collignon, a microbiologist and head of the infectious diseases and microbiology unit at the Canberra Hospital, is one of Australia's foremost experts in infection control. If anyone knows about bugs, it is Collignon, and he is vehemently opposed to Canberra using recycled sewage in its drinking water.

He has expressed his opinion in The Canberra Times and in an interview on local ABC radio, when he enumerated the risks. The effect on the capital's complacent intelligentsia was akin to Moses' descent from Sinai. In this eco-correct core of the national capital, that is no small feat.

Collignon's opposition to the plan is simple. Canberra just doesn't need to take the risk of introducing recycled sewage to the potable supply. From a public health view, introducing recycled sewage into the drinking supply is a last-ditch scenario because, unlike many parts of the world - for example Singapore, which uses the bulk of its recycled water for industry, or parts of Africa, where a natural water supply is a scarce commodity - Canberra has a plentiful and pure natural supply. Indeed, one compelling reason for choosing the site of the national capital was its water supply.

Says Collignon: "Worldwide there are localities where there is no alternative but to accept the risks associated with using recycled sewage. However, whenever possible, when we can avoid placing treated sewage into it is obviously desirable to avoid this hazard. In Canberra there is no reason to take this risk."

He makes no bones about the hazards: infections by virulent pathogens, the ones we know about and a lot of new ones; possible contamination with oestrogen, which is almost impossible to break down, and antibiotic drugs; and ultimately the worst-case scenario, the possible catastrophic effects of system failure.

"If coliforms (for example, E. coli) are present in the treated water, this implies faecal contamination and thus a failure of the system," he says. "Around the world, numerous outbreaks with water contaminated with viruses and cryptosporidiosis have occurred despite low or zero coliform counts. These indicator bacteria take one or two days to grow and identify."

Because of this factor, Collignon is also worried there is no plan in the ACT for storage of the treated sewage water in aquifers, as in California.

"Presumably the water will be pumped directly back into our dams after treatment," he says. "This will mean that even when we detect a failure with our treatment system, there will be little we can do about it because the contaminated water will already be in our dams."

Sewage recycling, particularly with reverse osmosis, is also expensive. The estimated cost is in the vicinity of $150 million, as much as the cost of expanding Canberra's rain catchment.
Collignon argues that introducing expensive sewage recycling as the first option, rather than reversing the priority and building a larger dam, is illogical.

It is hard to ignore someone of his professional status. His view is backed by an increasingly vocal group in Canberra that blames the Stanhope Government's failure to manage Canberra's water supply, more than any dire long-term necessity, for the shortage and that is asking where all the water has gone.

The easy answer is the drought. At the end of 2005 Stanhope declared that drought over, although this was news to the residents who soon found themselves back on water restrictions in 2006.

However, the ACT has large volumes of unused water. The territory uses only about 65GL a year (of which 30GL is returned to the system) and it is a big exporter of water to NSW (about 471GL a year). There is growing suspicion that the situation facing Canberra may not have arisen if it had better storage capacity and if so much water had not been let downstream in environmental flows.

Last year, which local water, power and gas authority ACTEW head Michael Costello has dubbed the horror drought year, the ACT had 25GL flow into the dams and let out 17GL. On average, about 46GL is released in environmental flows and 75GL is lost in spills. Spills occur frequently with the Cotter dam because of its low storage capacity.

As Collignon points out, this released water is relatively free from infection. He asks: "Why not find ways to withhold 9GL of this water? Is this not a better option than pumping 9GL of very expensively treated waste-water upstream into our reservoirs when we cannot be assured it will always be free of harmful microbes?" Good question.

The increasing public disquiet over the lack of consultation about the recycling option is a setback for the Stanhope Government which, ironically, is facing criticism from its former minister for health, Simon Corbell. The attempt to sneak water recycling under the radar of public scrutiny is only the latest embarrassment for Stanhope's Labor Government, which looks increasingly incompetent, driven by ideology and the politics of distraction.

To cap it off, June was a wet month, with more than double the average rainfall, bringing the year's rainfall so far close to the normal 65-year average. Yet, according to ACTEW's figures, Canberra's dams are only 40 per cent full. The water authority has put up the price of water again by a minimum of $75 a household, and introduced new megalitre usage charges that will particularly hit family households.

The Orwellian reasoning behind the price hike is typical of the place many of us call Nohoperstan. Due to water restrictions that have halved Canberra's regular usage, ACTEW revenue has fallen this past year, so the price must go up. Because Canberrans did the right thing, they are being punished for it.

See - Canberra - recycled water battleground.