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Mar 26, 2023

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News | 10 May 2023 Our friends at Wellington Water manage the water

News | 10 May 2023

Our friends at Wellington Water manage the water infrastructure on behalf of the Council. They are working days, nights, and weekends to make sure your drinking water is safe and healthy, your wastewater disappears safely, and stormwater drains away.

Within Wellington city alone, they have fixed 2,581 leaks this year and are currently working on large-scale water infrastructure projects in the central city.

We have had a few questions on what these works are. Here are how the current main projects of work are tracking.

Wellington Water is building a new underground pump station in Inglewood Place, off Taranaki Street. As part of the upgrade of the CBD wastewater network, the upgrade to the Taranaki Street Pump Station is to ensure future resilience, support population growth and protect the environment.

This pump station will collect and transport wastewater. It will move wastewater from a gravity pipe (no pressure) and pressurise it so that it can travel to the main pipe (the interceptor) and then to the Moa Point Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Pump stations are usually built underground. There are lot of them, and they are very important to the network.

Work excavating the 9m deep shaft started in the New Year and has now been completed. This was done in two stages, with the first part down to 5m below ground where a structural ring beam and shotcrete wall were installed to the inside of the piles.

The dig then went a further 4m down to the bottom of the shaft where the crew is now starting work to install the 800mm thick steel reinforced concrete floor. This will be completed over the next few weeks, starting with installing the underfloor structural drainage component followed by the concrete floor pour and steel reinforcing.

A new rising main (pressurised pipe) is being built along Wakefield Street as part of the major Wellington CBD renewals programme.

This new rising main will deliver many benefits including increasing the capacity and resilience of the CBD's wastewater network and providing additional back-up in the network and lowering the contamination risk to the harbour.

Stage one was completed in December. The construction programme for stage two, the remainder of this new rising main, will commence in September following the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup.

Wellington Water are replacing an existing rising main along Victoria Street that has reached the end of its life. Work has started on the first stage of advance works and will be completed by the end of May. These advance works are needed to accommodate the construction of the upgrade works of Te Mataphi.

The next stage will complete the remaining section between Victoria Street to the pump station located on Willeston Street. This will start in 2025 following completion of other construction projects including Civic Administration Building demolition, and completion of the Wakefield and Taranaki Street rising mains.

The new Taranaki Street rising main will connect to the lower rising main system to provide continued service while the other rising mains are replaced in the future.

The project will also create a back-up in the system, so if a problem arises, like a burst pipe, or if an upgrade is needed, there is capacity in the system for the wastewater to be stored or pumped via an alternative route to the interceptor.

With design now complete, the project is in the final procurement phase with pricing received from the contractor and the works programme finalised. Construction will commence in the second half of August following the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup.

To keep up to date with the work Wellington Water is doing, head to their website or Facebook.

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