Innovative approach to managing rural water & wastewater infrastructure

Abstract

The load or stresses that Increasing Julia Creek is the principal town of McKinlay Shire Council and is located 260km east of Mount Isa. In June 2023, Langtree Consulting finalised the water and sewerage asset management plans for the Council for its water and sewerage assets at Julia Creek. Julia Creek has a very small population of about 500 residents but this grows to up to 3000 or more during tourist season. Julia Creek is fully sewered and has a full water reticulation system relying solely on water from the Great Artesian Basin. Many of its assets were constructed in the 60’s and 70’s and some of the key assets have massive replacement costs that are not sustainable for this small town. During the development of the asset management plans, one of the key drivers in the plan was to identify opportunities for infrastructure replacement innovation whereby expensive assets could be replaced with different systems with the same or similar functional capability but at substantially reduced replacement cost. This was critical to enable the Council to be able to fund its depreciation. Cost escalations in the last few years have been particularly punishing when it comes to valuing assets and all Councils face the same dilemma…how to keep depreciation expenses within the financial capabilities of the Council when asset replacement costs are sky rocketing. Some of the innovative solutions for these AMP’s included consideration of the replacement of the wine glass water tower, the gravity sewer network up to 8m deep, water supply bores and some elements in the sewerage treatment train. As these asset plans were the Council’s first attempt at seriously quantifying and valuing their assets, one of the other key outcomes of the project was to create cad files and other digital records of the assets that could in time become part of a GIS system. Field survey was undertaken over some weeks picking up water and sewerage assets and this information was transferred into cad plans and asset registers. It is taken for granted in this day and age that everyone has a GIS information on their assets but for small Council’s like McKinlay Shire, GIS is just another desirable corporate feature that needs to stand in the long line for funding. Another unique feature of the sewer AMP was the cleaning and cctv of much of the sewer network and the condition inspection of all sewer manholes. The cleaning of the deep sewers was a considerable challenge but the degree of siltation pointed to a number of issues with debris from failing ladders, improperly capped redundant connections, the likely poor condition of private drainage and inadequate flushing flows. This exercise proved to be invaluable for the background data of Council’s sewerage maintenance programs and capital works programs. McKinlay Shire Council now have sound AMP documents that they can use to plan their maintenance and renewal programs. Innovative thinking was used for asset replacement of some key and expensive assets and this has allowed a significant reduction in depreciation expenses. These AMP’s set up options for GIS development and identify opportunities for other asset improvements. The development of these AMP’s (on a tiny scale) demonstrates a classic example of their benefit for corporate governance and for sound financial and engineering planning and decision making. In this case, Julia Creek was fertile territory for asset management planning with the eye for innovation.