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Lake Hayes water conservation

Friday 14 December 2012, 2:13PM

By Queenstown Lakes District Council

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QUEENSTOWN

From Monday morning the Queenstown Lakes District Council is asking residents on the Lake Hayes Scheme to apply water conservation to all watering and irrigation, QLDC general manager infrastructure Erik Barnes said.

“At this time of year the scheme can be challenged, despite it being of appropriate volume for the number of connected households. The only solution to that is to have everyone adopt good practice in terms of keeping their gardens going,” Mr Barnes said.

The Council was reluctant to have to issue a watering ban on the scheme and last year, due to the collective efforts of the community, a ban was not required, he said.

“That’s the way we want to keep it but at the end of the day the Council has no choice but to ensure that appropriate amounts of water are available for fire-fighting purposes. If we get below that point we will need to impose a ban,” Mr Barnes said.

The pumping capacity for the scheme was 37 litres per second (four litres a minute, per property). Any more than would empty the reservoir faster than it could fill, he said.

“The reservoir contains 585 cubic metres of which 180 must be kept as a fire fighting reserve. At peak times the usage at Lake Hayes can be higher than four litres a minute per property and the spare capacity in the reservoir can disappear in the space of a few hours,” Mr Barnes said.

The restrictions included:

Setting timers to water for half an hour between the hours of midnight to 6am.

Using hand held hoses only from 6am until midday.
No irrigation from midday to midnight.

“We have contacted high end users to remind them that the restrictions will be coming into play and we have received positive co-operation,” Mr Barnes said.

Council would continue to closely monitor the Lake Hayes scheme throughout summer. The restriction placed on Lake Hayes users was something Council would like to see all residents across the district adopt.

“We are running a campaign district-wide to ask people to consider changing the way they use water to ensure our communities are not saddled with an unaffordable water cost over the next 10 years,” Mr Barnes said.

The request to use water wisely at Lake Hayes should be considered by all residents.

Users of the Lake Hayes scheme included: Lake Hayes Estate, Ladies Mile, the Arrowtown- Lake Hayes Road, Speargrass Flat Road etc. Any resident in doubt of their connection could call the Council to check 03 441 0499.