16 January 2024
Statement:
At about 8.30pm on Sunday, we experienced a failure in the treatment process at the Shepparton Water Treatment Plant, meaning the plant was running at seriously reduced capacity, and we couldn’t treat any water for a period of about six hours.
To ensure we could continue to meet demand we drew down our treated water storage reserves, so we asked customers to reduce their non-essential water use to take the pressure off the plant while we worked to restore full treatment capacity.
Specialists were working around the clock and managed to get processes running again at about 1am on Monday morning at about 30% of normal capacity, which would have been only enough water to meet half of the daily demand.
Throughout the day operators began to increase capacity to a rate of about 50 megalitres per day (the equivalent volume of about 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools), which is the maximum it had recently been running at due to poor raw water quality as a result of the floods.
Raw water quality from the Goulburn River continued to improve on Monday, so in the afternoon we were able to bring the plant back up to its full treatment capacity rate of 70ML/day and begin refilling depleted water storages.
Overnight Monday and into Tuesday we continued to fill our major 14ML treated water storage in Shepparton, which is expected to reach full capacity overnight Tuesday.
This meant we could lift the request to conserve water on Tuesday morning.
We’d like to thank everyone for their help in reducing their water usage over the past 48 hours, including industrial customers who also helped to reduce their demand.
We’ll continue to closely monitor the plant over the next couple of days and we will have staff onsite to continue regularly testing the raw water and adapting the treatment process as necessary.
While the raw water quality is improving, we are still seeing really high levels of discoloration (about 10 times higher than normal) in the supply from the Goulburn River so it means we need to adapt the treatment process.
Some customers may be noticing a change in the taste of their water as a result – this is only temporary and will return to normal as the raw water quality continues to improve.
We’ve already seen raw water quality improving upstream in the Goulburn River at our treatment plants in Alexandra, Seymour and Murchison as a result of fresh water being released from Lake Eildon, which should also bring more improvement at Shepparton tomorrow (Wednesday).
Customers were supplied fully treated, safe to drink water from our treated water storage reserves at all times.