Northern Peninsula Area Water Supply
SunWater has been providing facility management services for the infrastructure comprising the Northern Peninsula Area (NPA) on Cape York since 1997. The intake structure on the Jardine River is located approximately 15km from Bamaga Water Treatment Plant. Bamaga and its surrounding communities depend largely on the Jardine River for their water supplies. The River is Queensland's largest perennial stream. The topography includes swamps and heath lands with tropical vegetation, which includes many varieties of New Guinea origin. The water quality in the river varies depending on the seasons.
Asset
Water Treatment Plant
Project Duration
1997 - ongoing
Client
Department of Infrastructure and Planning
Location
The water treatment plant supplies the NPA approximately 960km north of Cairns and covers five communities located on Cape York with a population of 3,000 people.
Project Overview
SunWater provides services operations and maintenance of raw water supply, filtration, treatment and fluoridation, delivery, water quality services for monitoring and compliance, demand management and strategic asset management planning to the NPA. These services cover the infrastructure in the area which includes the Jardine River Pump Station and pipelines, water treatment facilities and distribution systems to five communities.
Solution
The water treatment plant is the largest and most sophisticated of SunWater’s plants. When constructed, SunWater was recognised for its ability to deliver such an advanced technology to a remote location in Queensland. A major priority for SunWater was working alongside the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Infrastructure Program that is administered by the Community Support Branch of the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy.
From the Jardine River Pump Station, the water is pumped along two parallel pipelines approximately 15km to the 15ML raw water storage at the water treatment plant. The original 300mm diameter cement raw water pipeline was duplicated in 2006 with a 375mm diameter ductile iron pipeline to increase the transfer capacity, to help meet the increase water demand. This duplication pipeline was designed by SunWater.
The Water Treatment Plant is designed to produce a total flow of 6 ML/d for short periods, typical production flow is 5.2 ML/day.
The plant is fully automatic in operation, including start-up, shutdown and monitoring procedures. The MEMCOR© CMF is a Continuous Micro-Filtration process. Raw water is supplied via an in-line strainer to remove gross solids, to the CMF units A and B. The CMF or micro-filtration modules have within each module a bundle of hollow, porous, polypropylene fibres 0.6mm external diameter and 0.3mm internal diameter with a nominal pore size of 0.2um. Water enters into each module at one end and flows along the outside of the hollow fibres (direct flow mode).
Filtration takes place from the outside of the fibres through the porous walls in to the centre of the tube or lumen. During filtration contaminants build up on the outside walls of the fibres while clean water collected in the lumen passes out of each end. After filtration, the water is dosed with soda ash for pH correction, disinfected with sodium hypochlorite, as well as being fluoridated with Fluorosilicic Acid prior to passing into the 1ML treated water storage.
High lift pumps then transport the water to the storage tanks at each of the five communities (2 x 1.6 ML and 4 x 2ML) before passing through the approximately 35km of reticulation system to the individual customers.
Features
Key project infrastructure includes:
- Raw water pumps and pipelines
- The water treatment plant is designed to produce a total flow of 6 ML/d for short periods, whilst long term production flow is 5.2 ML/day
- Treats water without the use of chemical agents
- Highly sophisticated treatment filters out bacteria
- Metered reticulation system
Our Role
Asset management, process investigations, design engineering and compliance