Monitoring
Constant water quality testing and monitoring ensures that both the Hastings town and village water supplies are crystal clear.
The Town Water Supply is pumped from the beautiful Hastings River at Koree Island and is stored in the Port Macquarie and Cowarra Off-Creek Storage Dams. The flow and water quality in the Hastings River is monitored 24 hours a day 365 days a year thanks to the fully automated Aqualab at Koree Island.
If water quality drops, the pumps are automatically switched off. This ensures that only clean and pure water makes it into our dams.
The Comboyne, Long Flat and Telegraph Point Village Water Supplies are pumped from the Thone, Hastings River and Wilson River respectively. All three villages have brand new Water Treatment Plants which use microfiltration to produce the highest quality of drinking water.
Both the Village and Town Water continues to be monitored as it makes it way from the dams and reservoirs to homes and businesses around the Hastings.
There are more than 50 monitoring taps around the Hastings and 130 samples are taken and tested every month. This allows the Council to ensure that the water remains of a high drinking quality while it travels through the pipes to our homes.
Council also monitors the water quality in the rivers and creeks that flow into the Hastings River on a four-monthly basis.
The water is tested in the Hastings Council's Water Testing Laboratory in Port Macquarie. Some highly specialised tests are sent away to other laboratories.
AquaLab
The AquaLab water quality analyser accurately monitors physical and chemical water quality parameters on a near real time basis on samples collected through a remote sample pumping system.
The AquaLab unit automatically emulates laboratory procedures, the data collected and transmitted to Council's SCADA computer system includes: low level nutrient detection including reactive phosphate, nitrate, ammonia, total nitrogen and total phosphorous.
The Council's Supervisory Control Data and Acquisition System (SCADA) is programmed to consider the water quality, river level, dam level and river water abstraction licensing conditions.
If AquaLab tells the SCADA system that the river is too low or that the water is not good enough to drink. The SCADA system automatically switches off the pumps and lets the Council workers know. The water flow in the river is measured with a Doppler Radar and the data is automatically sent to the SCADA system.
