Fifty Years of Water Sensitive Urban Design, Salisbury, South Australia

Highlights

Low Impact Development was able to be adopted over a 50 year period by the City of Salisbury as it expanded from 4160 to 137,000 people

The management of stormwater and groundwater was integrated through use of wetlands and managed aquifer recharge.

Federal, state and local government contributed with developers and local industry to establish the integrated system as a commercial business supplying recycled water for non-potable amenity and industrial use.

It has been shown with little additional water treatment, water originally treated through wetlands and aquifer storage could be safely withdrawn for a range of uses including as a potable water source.

Abstract

Australia has developed extensive policies and guidelines for the management of its water. The City of Salisbury, located within metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia, developed rapidly through urbanisation from the 1970s. Water sensitive urban design principles were adopted to maximise the use of the increased run-off generated by urbanisation and ameliorate flood risk. Managed aquifer recharge was introduced for storing remediated low-salinity stormwater by aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) in a brackish aquifer for subsequent irrigation. This paper outlines how a municipal government has progressively adopted principles of Water Sensitive Urban Design during its development within a framework of evolving national water policies. Salisbury’s success with stormwater harvesting led to the formation of a pioneering water business that includes linking projects from nine sites to provide a non-potable supply of 5 × 10⁶ m³·year⁻¹. These installations hosted a number of applied research projects addressing well configuration, water quality, reliability and economics and facilitated the evaluation of its system as a potential potable water source. The evaluation showed that while untreated stormwater contained contaminants, subsurface storage and end-use controls were sufficient to make recovered water safe for public open space irrigation, and with chlorination, acceptable for third pipe supplies. Drinking water quality could be achieved by adding microfiltration, disinfection with UV and chlorination. The costs that would need to be expended to achieve drinking water safety standards were found to be considerably less than the cost of establishing dual pipe distribution systems. The full cost of supply was determined to be AUD$1.57 m⁻³ for non-potable water for public open space irrigation, much cheaper than mains water, AUD$3.45 m⁻³at that time. Producing and storing potable water was found to cost AUD$1.96 to $2.24 m⁻³.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) / Stormwater harvesting / Water recycling drinking water / Low impact development / Water sensitive urban design

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to City of Salisbury for sharing information on their water systems. We wish to thank the following partners to two major research projects; Aquifer Storage Transfer and Recovery (ASTR) and Managed Aquifer Recharge and Stormwater Use Options (MARSUO) that supported much of the data and analysis synthesized in this paper. These include the Commonwealth Government of Australia for its support through the Australia-Europe Research Collaboration Fund and the National Water Commission, the State Government of SA through the Premiers Science and Research Fund and the Goyder Institute for Water Research, and other partners; CSIRO Land and Water, City of Salisbury, the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Natural Resources Management Board, the former United Water International, SA Water Corporation, University of South Australia and University of Adelaide. The lead author also acknowledges an invitation from Professor Haifeng Jia to enable a keynote talk at the Low Impact Development 2016 Conference in Beijing, and which became the motivation for this journal paper. The authors are indebted to three anonymous reviewers of the journal for helpful comments that improved the paper.

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