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A message from the Director
 This month, UWSRA will be officially halfway through its five-year mandate. Since the Alliance was formed in 2007, the water situation for SEQ has changed dramatically.
Back then dam levels were down to 16 percent and emergency measures were being put into place with new infrastructure being built to secure future water supplies.
Today, dams are 97 percent full across the region, Traveston Crossing Dam will not be built, and the State Government has decided that purified recycled water (PRW) will only be used as an emergency response when dams reach 40 percent.
The context has changed significantly and the Alliance is responding accordingly with a realigned program.
A new set of research priorities is emerging. There’s a greater focus on reducing water grid demand, ensuring the quality of our diverse water sources and planning for efficiency and sustainability.
We now have a portfolio of 16 projects where we’ve got a refocused effort to pick up this change in context.
Some projects are coming to a conclusion, including the NDMA Formation Potential project and Disinfection By-Products (DBP) Formation and Minimisation in Drinking Water project.
We’ve had some great science results from each of these projects, and the plan now is to get the final reports written before shifting focus to look at DBP formation in alternate source waters across the Water Grid.
The PRW project is being discontinued in its current format to focus on four key project areas: hospital wastewater; pathogens and trace contaminants in reservoirs; assessing health risks of rainwater tanks and stormwater; and enhancing work on bioassays and risk communication.
I’d like to acknowledge the research that has been done in each of these areas, where we’ve seen excellent reports and outcomes that are already making a difference to SEQ’s water management.
We’re now involved in detailed planning to enable each of the new projects to commence seamlessly in this new financial year. A full list of the realigned programs and projects is included in Board News.
Our continuing projects are all largely on track and there are also two smaller project areas that we’re scoping out: human reliability factors in managing risks in water supply systems; and ‘water smart cities’, looking at water from a broader regional planning framework.
The Alliance is at an exciting and dynamic stage and I look forward to reporting on our outcomes in coming months.
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