Council investigating emergency water supply

Invercargill City Council is moving ahead with investigating a critical piece of infrastructure aimed at strengthening the city’s resilience, and ensuring the community had a reliable water supply available in emergency situations.

Council’s Alternate Water Supply project was discussed at a Water Committee meeting yesterday, as part of an update on major Three Waters infrastructure projects in Invercargill and Bluff.

After the meeting, committee chair Deputy Mayor Grant Dermody said the project was about future-proofing the city’s water supply.

Invercargill and Bluff relied on just a single source of water, the Ōreti River, with capacity for just a few days’ worth of water to be stored in the city’s existing network.

“This is about making sure our community has a Plan B that works when we need it the most,” Dermody said.

“Looking into establishing the infrastructure we need to be able to call upon in an emergency gives our community an extra level of security, and layer of resilience, in the face of natural disasters, contamination, or unexpected disruptions to our primary water supply.

“It’s about preparedness. When something goes wrong, people expect clean water to still be there. Our responsibility is to make sure it is.”

At the meeting, senior project director Alistair Snow told the committee that the project to establish an emergency water supply source at Awarua was now in its investigative phase.

A test bore and two production wells were in place on-site already, with additional production and test wells to be installed by the end of the year. The project team will gather data from pumping to better understand the underground aquifer, and how the surrounding environment would react to the water being drawn down, Snow said.

Engagement with nearby property owners and businesses, focused on establishing access agreements, understanding operational impacts, and exploring opportunities such as the use of pump testing discharge water, was underway. Council was also engaging with mana whenua and Te Ao Mārama (TAMI) through the project’s governance group.

Resourcing was also underway for the water take consent application, environmental baseline assessments, and network engineering solutions, and Council aimed to lodge its next round of resource consent applications in mid-2026, he said.