How to Water Your Precincts

Julie Horne, Vinutha Anantharajappa (Sydney Water)

Albert Ho, Samantha Morris (Aurecon)

The New Zealand Government is focused on economic growth and supporting infrastructure development is one of the key priorities to achieving this goal. Provision of resilient and cost-effective water infrastructure at all levels of development is critical in achieving the growth vision. This paper presents an example of a Sydney Water Corporation (Sydney Water) project and the benefits in precinct level infrastructure planning, from a drinking water perspective.

The Western Sydney Aerotropolis Growth Area (WSAGA) consists of ten planned precincts surrounding the proposed Western Sydney International Airport (WSIA) that are forecast to undergo significant economic growth. At ultimate development (~2056), the WSAGA has the potential for 200,000 new jobs and over 100,000 new dwellings within WSAGA and the adjoining area. Construction works have commenced, and servicing is required to meet staged development. Refer to Figure 1 for locality plan.

At present, Sydney Water has limited drinking water infrastructure in the WSAGA, where the existing system capacity of the Cecil Park water supply zone (WSZ) is sufficient only for current rural land uses and is not able to service growth from the precincts. In addition to growth, a total of 10ML/day of construction water demand is required at the earliest, to support the major infrastructure projects (motorway, road upgrades, metro) underway within the WSAGA.

Strategic and adaptive planning for servicing the WSAGA area has been carried out to provide the strategic servicing for the area. Options assessment was undertaken to identify transfer capacity and staged extension of the trunk water supply infrastructure in line with the development timeframes. However, there is a need to assess the precinct level drinking water infrastructure that is ultimately required to service the demands in the precincts and staged delivery. This will be used to provide ongoing servicing advice to developers to plan their developments, and utilities for construction water requirements.

This paper describes the approach, methodology and considerations in defining an operationally efficient, precinct trunk and reticulation level servicing strategy for the WSAGA, as well as the benefits of planning drinking water infrastructure onthe precinct scale.