Queensland Urban Utilities (QUU) provides water and wastewater services across the regions of Brisbane, Ipswich, Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim and Somerset.Mr Maynard began as Chief Executive Officer on 1 July 2011. He has previously held executive positions within the private sector including at Ampol, Fletcher Challenge and Fonterra, and he has also worked in government at Brisbane City Council.

“The move to Queensland Urban Utilities is both motivating and exciting because I get to work in a business that supplies products and services that are critical to everyday life. You can make a difference to people's lives on a daily basis,” he said.

“The level of energy and motivation of our people is evidenced by the astounding amount of progress that has been achieved in a very short period of time – not the least of which involved working through the worst flood we’ve had in more than 35 years.”

Mr Maynard said one of the key challenges for the organisation continues to be increasing the understanding of the role of water utilities.

“For a long time in Australia we have taken for granted that we have access to clean, fresh drinking water simply by turning the tap on. We want our customers to fully understand what it takes to deliver high quality drinking water to their taps and what’s involved in taking away wastewater through the simple push of a button.”

QUU’s asset base ranges from civil infrastructure with an expected life of more than 100 years through to mechanical and electrical equipment with a design life in some cases of less than eight years. This includes tanks, wet wells, pipe work, pumps, variable speed drives, and instrumentation and control systems.

Trenchless Technology and QUU

The company embraces methods from microtunnelling and relining for the delivery sewer upgrades and new works, to CCTV techniques for the condition assessment of infrastructure.

“Using various new technology methods must be done in co-ordination with other key parts of infrastructure delivery to ensure a project is delivered on time and within budget while mindful of any community or environmental impacts,” Mr Maynard said. “Microtunnelling is extremely beneficial, but consideration has to be given as to the number of shafts required and the cost of sinking them.”

Getting a balance with whole-of-life project costs can be a challenge for QUU. For instance, the cost of bypass pumping can often exceed the cost of sewer relining, or the cost of shafts can exceed the cost of microtunnelling. Mr Maynard said that QUU is constantly looking to learn about new technology, so that whole-of-life projects can be delivered at a competitive cost.

“It also is important to consider impacts on local communities and the environment, and site restoration and offset planting are extremely important parts of our operations,” added Mr Maynard.

All of QUU’s trenchless work is delivered by contractors and about 25 staff are involved with trenchless projects, including those working in design, projects and asset management.

The challenges

But despite the worst floods in nearly 50 years, water and sewerage services provided by QUU were maintained to all but around 1,000 homes. And within six months of the floods, the damaged infrastructure was back to working within all regulatory and operational requirements. QUU has also announced that it will invest $A341 million in infrastructure projects in 2011–12 to cater for regional growth and urban renewal.

Asset management

QUU’s approach for managing the maintenance and renewals of its existing asset base is adopted from the four basic strategies of asset management:

• Periodic maintenance: recurrent preventative works carried out to a predetermined time frame, be it calendar and/or equipment run time.
• Condition based: where the degradation state of the asset is monitored and measured and when or if it reaches a critical point, pro-active corrective work is identified and implemented to prevent failure. This is applied at a periodic frequency or in real time.
• Run to fail: where the consequence of asset failure is considered to have negligible impact upon customer service levels, process, environment, safety and/or financial considerations when compared to the other three strategies. Asset redundancy is often applied as a management strategy for this approach.
• Design out/renew: where the asset is no longer providing the required level of service, and/or has come to the end of its functional life, it is identified to be renewed or rehabilitated.

A combination of these four strategies is applied to QUU's asset base, taking into consideration the standards of service, consequence, likelihood, legislation and expected life.

The delivery and implementation of the asset management strategy is achieved through the operational maintenance, and capital renewal funding streams, and their associated programs.