Forrest I'll waive my concern about management of the recycling if laws are put in place that make it a capital offense for both the relevant CEO and minister should it be found that cost cutting has contributed to a safety risk with mains drinking water.

The finding would be the outcome of an investigation with the terms of reference staffing etc for the investigation set by the opposition party for the relevant period.

I'm still more for the recyling than against it but would like serious thought given to minimising the risks from the potential pitfalls (political as well as technical).

R0bert

Capital punishment, ROb? Not overstating your anxieties here, are you?

Quite a few major urban areas use approriately treated recyled water, notably London and Singapore.The breakdown of systems that ensure the safety of drinking water are no more likely to pose a threat from water processed from recycled sources than those from "natural" catchments (which include feces ridden farmlands, open aqueducts with dead wombats in them, etc). My guess is that properly treated former sewage is probably the safest of the lot.

Despite the yuk factor.

Snout, you are probably correct about the safety factor in which case a really clear and significant penalty for placing that at risk should not cause to much distress.

I don't really like capital punishment - the comment was somewhat tongue in cheek but I would like us to find a way to make it abundently clear to the those making the real decisions that public safety is the biggest of them. Some way to get the pollies and bean counting management to ensure the engineering people don't have to take the wrong shortcuts.

I've seen how little respect maintenance and reliability get when you have a managment focussed on short term cost savings above all else in another industry.

Other suggestions on how to keep safety at the forefront of non engineering managements minds are welcome.

R0bert

I don't have a personal interest in this problem, you see, despite living only 55Km from the Brisban GPO, I do not have a town water supply, & neither do thousands of my neighbors.

For 18 years our domestic water has come off the roof via a tank system. We have never even come close to running dry, & that was with 6 people, including 2 teenage daughters with long hair.
Outside water comes from a small dam, & that struggles from time to time, particularly 93 & 94, when, each year, we had less than half this years rainfall.
We have green grass when it rains, & brown when it doesn't, & a lot of shrubs, trained to handle dry times.

The majority of Brisbane people could do the same, & harvest ALL their domestic water requirements off their roof. In the event that Brisbane goes to recycled water, those who don't want to drink it, do have this choice, as do Toowoomba people. You would still require town water for outside use, if your allowed to use town water, outside, ever again.

Forest Gumpp

Perhaps we're slightly at cross purposes here. My point about recyling was simply that water is not, technically, in short supply, either in Towoomba, or in any other metropolitan area of Australia, because the potable recyling option exists.

Yes, certainly Brisbane could desalinate more water, and thus make water available to Toowoomba, either from Wivenhoe or from Emu Creek.

It appears that the government's refusal to allow either solution relates to its concern about Brisbane's water supply. I think we agree that to the extent that that's a problem, it should be addressed by more desalination.

However, that still leaves the issue of the cost of the rest of such a project, which we seem to agree should be born by the users in Toowoomba.

It's true that the government has ruled both solutions out primarily because they would impact on Brisbane's water supply, but that doesn't mean they'd necessarily be practical. Not only is there the cost issue, but also the problem of lead time. While it's easy to to claim that the lead time issue could have been addressed by timely action, I'm less clear that the problem has been recognised for that long. It has always been easy to hope that the drought would end.

R0bert

We can address the problem of ill-considered management cost cutting by requiring that the senior management live in Toowoomba, and not use a rainwater tank.

Sylvia.

Recycling of water is already a reality for many communities right across Queensland. Toowoomba, for example has a sewerage treatment works outleting its partly treated water into a creek and river system that flows to, and provides water for Dalby. The kind of recycling proposed is already happening and has been for as long as Toowoomba has had sewerage treatment. There is no Yuk factor, nor is there a public health issue. The proposal to provide water back into the water reservoirs was to be of a high quality than that currently being sourced by the Dalby community.

Centralised water requires Government to manage and control treatment and provision of water. Perhaps a decentralized model of investment in local water storage and treatment might work better. How about the Government providing a $7 billion dollar package (recently quoted number to build 4 dams) of $5,000 to each and every home in Queensland (1.4 Million). That would buy (from a quotation I received recently) about 40,000L of storage. Even in drought we have had 9 rain events in Brisbane that would fill this volume. Nine times 40,000L is more than my total annual usage.

While this is simplistic and is taking averaging to extreme it does indicate a potential to avoid serious water shortfalls. Even if only half of this was possible that is still in the hundreds of gigaliters and the cool thing is there is almost no energy cost.