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IT’S said to be like putting a huge slushie through the pipes.
Ice-pigging is set to be used on water mains around Bathurst as part of the ongoing effort to solve the city’s infamous dirty water woes.
Bathurst Regional Council has engaged the services of Suez Water And Treatment Solutions Australia to carry out the specialist task in coming months.
It is believed the ice-pigging technique will speed up the removal of any manganese still present in the vast network of pipes which supplies water to homes across the city.
This latest initiative follows the commissioning of the $5 million manganese removal plant at the water treatment plant at Gormans Hill last August.
The system has been extensively flushed since then, and divers have entered reservoirs to scrub down the walls as part of the clean-up process.
A dedicated ice-pigging outfit from Suez will spend 15 days in Bathurst to get the job done.
According to Suez ice-pigging operations manager Graeme Berriman, they are still in talks with Bathurst Regional Council over the actual dates when they will come to town.
So what is ice pigging?
“Basically, ice-pigging uses pretty much the same ice you see in the slushie machine at the garage,” Mr Berriman said.
“We use a pump to put the ice through the hydrant under pressure into the system.
“There’s pressure on both sides of the ice which makes it more of a solid block.
“The water pressure in the pipes is then used to push the ice along.
“It polishes inside the pipe as it goes along and anything that comes off the pipe is contained in the slush or ice.
“Any foreign materials in the slush removed from the pipes comes out with the ice, which is then collected into a tanker and then disposed of appropriately.”
Mr Berriman said around 15 metres of ice will clean about 100m of a 100-millimetre pipe.
“So that’s about 15 per cent of the overall volume of water to ice in the pipes,” he said.
“The machine we use to make the ice is inside a container on the back of truck and it’s just like a huge slushie machine with a big stirrer in it.
“We set the ice-making machine up on location and from there pump it into the system. Depending on the size of the pipes, we can normally do 4.5 kilometres a day if the pipes are 100mm in diameter.”
Mayor Gary Rush said the ice-pigging was a follow-up to the pipe flushing.
“The aim is to speed up the cleaning of the network of pipes we have in Bathurst,” Cr Rush said.
“This technique is all about getting the job done as quickly as possible. Without it the process could take much longer.”