Water recovery on track
The Goulburn-Murray Water Connections project is on track to meet its recovery requirements, with a new audit revealing the project had already recovered two-thirds of the water by the end of June last year.
The data, which was collected with three years of the $2 billion project remaining, revealed that by the end of last financial year a total of 282.7 Gl of the overall 429 Gl in savings was recovered.
Released by DELWP, the audit found a total of 231.5 Gl has been saved through modernisation works, with service point replacement and channel automation delivering more than half the savings.
The project, which commenced in 2008, has been through a series of challenges, with Victorian Water Minister Lisa Neville forced to step in and announce a ‘reset’ of the project in September 2016 after it was plagued by complaints and project delays.
Connections project director Frank Fisseler said the audit showed the project was ‘‘tracking well’’.
‘‘In fact, we’re ahead of the schedule in the Reset Delivery Plan,’’ Mr Fisseler said.
‘‘We are absolutely on track — and on time and on budget — to recover the full 429 Gl by project completion in October 2020.
‘‘Our tracking of water savings figures outside of the annual Department of Environment, Water, Land and Planning audit shows that since our Project Control Group was implemented in February 2016, we have achieved double the amount of water savings compared to the four years prior to February 2016.’’
The water savings outlined in the audit do not include the savings achieved during the $100 million winter works program last year, or other works delivered throughout the past nine months, including a further 13.5 Gl in savings delivered by projects that are undergoing a verification process.