Power and Water is vigilant that our water quality controls meet Australian Drinking Water Guidelines, which is international best practice.

Maintaining drinking water quality is a continuous journey of improvement and vigilance for every water service provider across the country and like its peers, Power and Water proactively seeks to identify opportunities for enhancement.

Power and Water demonstrates an ongoing commitment to the effective management of its drinking water supplies and publishes the entire drinking water quality management program annually. View the Water Quality reports here.

Senior Executive Manager of Water Services John Pudney said Power and Water conducts rigorous testing.

“We do testing on more than 20,000 water samples annually across the Territory and these samples are tested for up to 50 different aspects of water quality. Testing is done at a range of areas in the system from the water catchment to the tap.

Some of these tests require longer time periods to deliver results, so in accordance with best practice, there are a number of treatment barriers in our water quality system to minimise the risk of contaminants being delivered to the consumer.”

Routine maintenance ensures all Top End water storage tanks are pulled off line in the wet season for cleaning and disinfection while demand is down. This process identified Burkholderia Pseudomallei, a naturally occurring pathogen endemic in tropical regions of Australia in soils and surface waters and some shallow bore supplies.

It was detected in sediment build-up of the material at the bottom of one of the two McMinns storage tanks. The tank was cleaned and disinfected prior to being brought back on line.

“None of our testing of the chlorinated reticulation system has ever revealed detection of Burkholderia Pseudomallei, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our disinfection barriers,” said Mr Pudney.

A report that was commissioned by the corporation in 2015 helped identify some vulnerability in our processes which have been addressed and progressed over the past 18 months with positive outcomes.

In 2016, Water Services partnered with Remote and Regional Operations to improve the approach and application of our Drinking Water Quality Management System aligned with the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines.