Council seeks public help with bore project

13 February 2015

If you live in the Te Puke or Rangitāiki Plains area and have a bore you’re not using, or are willing to have a dedicated monitoring bore installed on your property, Bay of Plenty Regional Council wants to hear from you.

The Council has a drilling project under way to install ground water monitoring equipment and get systems up and running. Unused bores can be used for additional monitoring.

“Where possible we are installing dedicated monitoring bore fields at key locations to keep drilling and ongoing monitoring costs down. We’re also keeping and adding to existing ground water monitoring sites,” Bay of Plenty Regional Council Environmental Scientist Diane Harvey says.

The drilling project started in the past financial year in the Upper Rangitāiki and has since moved into the Te Puke area. It aims to help Council staff members understand what resources are there, so that decisions can be made on how much water can be allocated.

Staff members are collecting geological information by gathering samples of the drilling cuttings and hard rock cores. They are also collecting information about the layered aquifer systems during the drilling process by conducting pump tests at each water-bearing layer encountered. Water quality samples are collected and tested for a suite of chemicals such as fluorine, sodium, arsenic, zinc, iron, calcium, boron, manganese, magnesium, chloride, potassium, aluminium, silicon, sulphate phosphorous and nitrogen.

“We also measure other variables such as pH, temperature, conductivity and alkalinity, and tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, for age dating,” Diane says.

Members of the public can view live water level data and rainfall and rainfall recharge data on the Bay of Plenty Regional Council website. There is live data for sites that have already had telemetry systems installed. Council hopes to have live data available at all its groundwater monitoring sites at the completion of the project.

The project was planned following public consultation a couple of years ago and it’s great to see things get under way, Bay of Plenty Regional Council Senior Environmental Scientist Janine Barber says. “What we said we were going to do is coming to fruition. We want the public to be aware that we are steadily improving our knowledge of the groundwater resource.”

The first two bores have been completed and the Council expects to drill an additional two this financial year. Next year the project is expected to move into the Rangitāiki Plains area. It is still a couple of years away from completion.

If you have a bore you’re not using or are willing to have a dedicated monitoring bore installed on your property, please contact Diane Harvey on 0800 884 880 or email diane.harvey@boprc.govt.nz.

Ends.

© Scoop Media