Village residents will have reason to smile with pipeline’s water

The 61-kilometre Orange-to-Carcoar pipeline will be commissioned in the coming weeks after a year-long construction process which was delayed by a costly vandalism attack in July last year.

The bore water currently supplied to both villages does not contain fluoride, and Orange mayor Reg Kidd said residents would benefit from tapping into Orange’s supply, as the fluoridation process was a safe and effective way of preventing dental decay.

“It is unlikely residents will notice a difference in the water as commissioning occurs when water from the Orange supply is slowly added to the existing Spring Hill and Lucknow supply,” Cr Kidd said.

“Both systems produce high-quality drinking water, but there are benefits to using the Orange supply.

“The new system in place is more reliable than the existing bore water supplies in the villages and it is treated to a higher quality.”

Cr Kidd said residents of the villages were fortunate to be getting access to “some of the highest quality water in the state”, having won the Water Industry Operations Association of Australia NSW water taste test in 2015.

The $21.21 million pipeline project was delayed in 2017 when vandals drilled holes in plastic sewer pipes that were on the roadside, waiting to be laid into the ground. There was also hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage inflicted on the project’s machinery in the attack.

The pipeline, which was jointly funded by the NSW government, Orange City Council and Central Tablelands Water, uses steel pipes placed in underground trenches between one and two metres deep.

The majority of the pipeline was built adjacent to road corridors, with only small sections on private land, and includes pump stations to enable two-way water transfers.

Parliamentary Secretary for Western NSW Rick Colless said the “project will improve water security across a large area of Central West NSW, having flow on benefits to businesses, individuals and farms in the region”.