Mr Thompson has recently been named Australia’s top water engineer, having been awarded the National Local Government Engineering Medal for the Local Government Engineer of the Year from the Institution of Public Works Engineers Australia (IPWEA) and Engineers Australia.

Furthermore, the Port Macquarie Reclaimed Water Treatment Plant has been named the winner of the 2007 Engineers Australia Newcastle Division’s GHD Award for Innovation in Sustainable Engineering Excellence. The project has also received the 2007 NSW IPWEA Excellence Award for Innovation in Water Supply and Wastewater and the 2007 Australia Water Association NSW Branch Water Merit Environment Award.

When we asked Mr Thompson what it was about the reclaimed water project that makes it an award winner, he said that the Port Macquarie Reclaimed Water Supply Scheme is a major step forward for the Council in terms of identifying alternative sources of water supply for the local area.

“Traditionally we’ve relied heavily on the Hastings River to supply all our water supply needs, and as part of our strategic planning back as early as 1985 we realised that, while the river was going to remain a very good source of water, we had to actually begin to look at alternative sources of water in our local area, particularly those which would be available during periods of drought,” he said.

“Then, in 1995, we decided to look at treating sewage effluent to provide an alternative source of water which would lessen the demand for our current drinking water supply system…and from that decision in ’95 we have moved forward to develop the reclaimed water supply project and it now involves 13 km of purple pipe which has been installed within existing urban and CBD areas of Port Macquarie to supply the majority of Council facilities, playing fields, open space areas, toilet flushing in community buildings, and also to service business and commercial users within the existing Port Macquarie area with alternative water supply source.

“The idea is that we can provide a drought-proof source of water for all of our facilities and for a number of businesses, and, at the same time, put in place the sort of management systems that we will need in the future to be able to begin to look at providing alternative reclaimed water sources to new developments and residential areas. So everyone’s going to have two water meters, a traditional green water meter, which is your drinking water, and also a lilac or a purple water meter which is going provide the reclaimed water product to consumers for outside use, toilet flushing and laundry use.

“In that way, together with the BASIX requirements in NSW for new housing developments we’re hoping to reduce urban water demands by about 75 per cent in new residential areas.”

Mr Thompson said it would not be cost-effective to supply current residential areas with reclaimed water. The 13 km of piping that has already been put in place for the project has been installed in conjunction with a lot of roadworks, said Mr Thompson. “We’ve hopped into trenches with Telstra, Optus and Country Energy when they’ve already been digging up the road or footpath, so the cost of the scheme has been viable because the excavation work was already happening and we’ve been able to pick up our major water consumers, so we’re getting a lot of the big demand off our drinking water system,” he said.

“So for 13 km of pipe, we’ve picked up a lot of water demand which is going to be very beneficial. Trying to do that in an existing residential area would cost you a lot of money to re-lay the pipes and then not pick up so much demand.” However, he stated that in future Council may consider putting dual systems in place when existing water mains come up for renewal. “There’s always that potential,” said Mr Thompson, “But at the moment we’re concentrating on the most amount of usage for the least amount of pipework.”

Trenchless Technology played a role in aspects of this project. Mr Thompson said, “We actually were able to utilise a number of disused water mains. Those old pipes were still in the ground, so we used them in a number of cases as conduits to pull high density poly pipe through them, to avoid having to dig up a number of intersections and major road crossings.

“We also did a number of directional drilling projects which was a bit of a learning curve for us as we hadn’t done very much of that sort of work before, so we got a number of different providers in to do that work to give our own staff a bit of experience with what was the capability of that sort of technology.”

He said that there were a number of situations where it simply was not physically possible to open-trench through certain areas, and so directional drilled was used. “Most of them were only a couple of hundred metres at a time but it did avoid a lot of disruption to existing traffic and consumers, and allowed us to get the work done without causing too much grief to the general population,” he said.

Contractors Mid Coast Under Road Boring, based on the mid-coast of NSW, completed a number of directional drilling and HDPE pipe installations for the project, said Mr Thompson.

When we asked about other projects that are coming up in the Port Macquarie-Hastings area, Mr Thompson said that there are some large directional drilling projects coming up, that are out to tender at the moment.

A new urban release area just to the west of Port Macquarie, known as Area 13, is being developed by the Sovereign Hills Group, and will eventually become a town of between 15,000 and 20,000 people. So, Council will be servicing the area with sewerage and also with reclaimed water. Works are expected to be finished during 2009, so will be getting underway in the near future.

“There’s an area of acid sulphate soil that we need to cross and we won’t be able to open-trench that,” said Mr Thompson.

Acid sulphate soil, when exposed to the air, creates sulphuric acid that can then run into waterways and cause extensive environmental damage.

“There’s also an existing airport so we’ll be directionally drilling about one kilometre of about 500 mm diameter pipes.”

Discussing Mr Thompson’s career with the Port Macquarie-Hastings Council, we asked what made him want to focus on water supply management. Having been an employee of Council for the past 28 years, starting as a cadet engineer, Mr Thompson responded that in his earlier career he had the opportunity to work with some very experienced people who had moved into the local area of Port Macquarie from Sydney Water and started work with the Council. With the area growing quite quickly and water supply being one of the issues facing Council at the time, these engineers brought a lot of expertise and knowledge with them and Mr Thompson said he was very fortunate to be able to work with them as a junior.

“I think probably those couple of years as a junior engineer working with people with the sort of experience really encouraged me to get into the water industry and made me realise what a good area it was to work in, in the engineering field,” he said.

As the Manager of Water Supply Services, Mr Thompson’s job entails, operationally, the day-to-day delivery of water supply to consumers. It also involves the strategic planning and forward planning required to cater for the anticipated growth in the Port Macquarie area – being on the mid-north coast, the area is experiencing an approximate growth of 3 per cent per annum.

“We’ve been identified as one of the four top growth centres on the north coast of New South Wales so there’s a lot of development yet to happen in this area,” said Mr Thompson. In ensuring consistency of water supply to cater for that growth, Mr Thompson must simultaneously strive to protect the environment, especially since the beautiful surrounds are one of the major drawcards for people moving to the area. Mr Thompson must, therefore, “ensure that as we source water supply we’re not having a detrimental effect on our local river systems and waterways and water resources.”

As part of this growth and development, we asked Mr Thompson what potential is offered by Trenchless Technology, in his opinion. He said, “I think, particularly for schemes where we’re going to have to retrofit infrastructure, similar to what we’ve done with the reclaimed scheme, that the Trenchless Technology provides an opportunity to do that.

“We’ve probably been fortunate to have a lot of other related works happening that have allowed us to use traditional methods, but that will not always be the case. A lot of the time as we expand the current water supply scheme we are going to be relying more and more upon Trenchless Technologies to allow us to get into locations and areas to service more customers.

“The ability to directionally drill and place reclaimed water mains without excavating is going to become, I think, really very important for the expansion of these schemes. And particularly for us, in this location, with some of the acid sulphate soil problems that we face, there’s going to be probably no other alternative from an environmental point of view other than to use Trenchless Technology to install new services to cater for the growth in the area.”