SA Water Infrastructure

The Hon. J.S. LEE (15:12): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Water and the River Murray a question about burst water pipes.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.S. LEE: A burst water main in Craigburn Farm was unattended by SA Water, making residents wait for six months before it was fixed. Residents made complaints earlier this year about the leak located on the corner of Cummings and Archibald streets; yet, unfortunately, media reports stated that SA Water had washed their hands of the problem. When SA Water was contacted by The Advertiser in late July, they advised that the water was from an unsealed driveway, which was later proven wrong by The Advertiser, which had organised a site inspection, confirming that the water was welling up from the ground.

Only recently, SA Water accepted that the leak was from a broken pipe and their fifth site visit was to repair the damage. On 3 May this year, the chief executive officer of SA Water stated to the Budget and Finance Committee that from November 2016 SA Water had a new vision, which was to benchmark itself to the best utilities in the world and the best service providers in the world. My questions to the minister are:

1. Why did SA Water wait six months to address the problems and take responsibility, despite numerous complaints made by residents?

2. What consultation has the minister had with the local community about the burst water main in Craigburn Farm?

3. Is the minister satisfied with SA Water's approach to the Craigburn Farm burst water mains incident?

4. With these insights and failures, how can the minister justify that SA Water will reach its vision of benchmarking itself to the best utilities in the world and the best service providers in the world?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (15:14): I thank the honourable member for her most important question—if a somewhat ill-advised one, in terms of the information she is providing to the chamber. It is a matter for her if she seeks to rely on The Advertiser for her information. We all know the level of accuracy that supplies to its readers, but that is entirely up to her.

In relation to the particular situation the honourable member talks about where there was a shocking lack of follow-through from SA Water and its contractors, I have to say that that was incredibly disappointing. It was incredibly disappointing that it appears, on the face of it, that someone was going through a tick box exercise and not expending the extra effort in customer relations that we expect of our agents.

I have to say, frankly, I found it incredibly confronting that someone who, hopefully, would have gone through the cultural change in SA Water would have understood what was expected, to go that extra yard to help people when they ask for help, yet it was not provided in this situation. I have raised my concerns about this with SA Water. They understand the impact this has on the community. They understand now that it is my expectation that situations such as this would not occur in the future.

Let us remind ourselves—and the honourable member probably hasn't reflected on this for some time—that SA Water, in terms of its maintenance schedule, its replacement of water pipes and assets in the water system, produces an outcome with a massive investment that is actually one of the lowest water mains bursts in the country. The Bureau of Meteorology makes this comparison of utilities. They make a comparison of the number of bursts per hundred kilometres of pipe, so you can actually compare apples with apples. Smaller utilities might only have 7,000 or 13,000 kilometres of pipe. SA Water has 28,000 kilometres of pipe now, so you need to compare the per hundred kilometre pipe break, and we do have a very big difference between country breaks and metropolitan breaks.

The reason for that disparity is that we have reactive clay soils in Adelaide, which usually twice a year, in response to seasonal variation, have a preponderance of breaks that they do not have during the rest of the year. That is because when the clay soils wet up, they expand and apply pressure to the pipes. When they shrink, when the water is not there, those pipes get a similar amount of cracking pressure. It is exactly the same as is experienced particularly in the eastern suburbs of Adelaide in terms of our house foundations and the cracks that open and close periodically over the year.

As I said, any member of this place can go independently to the Bureau of Meteorology's web page or its published information that it puts out every year and look at the chart that actually compares water utilities by the number of water mains breaks. You will see SA Water down at the bottom with one of the lowest number of breaks per hundred kilometres of pipe compared to water utilities around the country. Why is that? It is because we invest over $150 million every single year in upgrading our water utility network—pipes, pumping stations, holding tanks.

We are now, as I have announced earlier in this place, investing another $55 million in upgrading the pipe network with newer pipes that are more flexible than the old pipes we have in place, particularly the old ductile metal pipes. We are also installing more valves on these mains water pipes than currently exist, so that when there is a break—and there will always be breaks; we have to manage them to be at the lowest level they possibly can—we can actually isolate the breaks to smaller segments of the pipes by having more valves placed more frequently along these water mains so that the number of people who will be put out by us having to close water off for a period of time to fix these breaks can be minimised as well.

We understand the inconvenience it causes to the community, and we work very hard to make sure we keep that inconvenience to as low a level as possible. The situation the honourable member raised in her question, however, is one that is an absolute outlier. It is one that I am very disappointed in. I have expressed my view to SA Water that they need to put in place processes to make sure that their staff, when going out to address these situations, don’t just tick a box on a form, but actually go out and look very hard to see if they can deliver what the customer is asking for.