A COMMUNITY meeting held by TasWater at Pioneer has failed to alleviate residents' concerns.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
TasWater held last Wednesday's meeting to discuss the completed review into Macquarie University's research, carried out by Water Research Australia.
Acting Dorset Mayor Greg Howard said Pioneer residents were unimpressed at the lack of progress TasWater had made in installing water tanks in the town.
"They're still pretty angry, and you can understand that, that they don't have a definitive solution to the problem," he said.
"They're angry about the fact that even though most of them have agreed that water tanks were the way to go in the short term anyway, it's taken 2½ years to only install nine tanks.
"Some of that delay might have been due to contract negotiations and things like that, but it's still a pretty poor effort for over a 2½-year time frame."
There are 15 residents still waiting to have water tanks installed and a further 11 residents have not yet signed a contract to receive a tank. Cr Howard said dissatisfied residents proposed a number of solutions at the meeting to ensure the town had access to safe drinking water.
"One of those was running a pump, putting a powerline to pump all the way over to the Ringarooma river, which is some distance away. There was another one . . . about another pipeline coming from another source or maybe out of the . . . dam that supplies the irrigation scheme."
Cr Howard said he questioned whether the infrastructure could be the primary cause of the high lead levels in Pioneer's water, because similar infrastructure had been installed in other Tasmanian towns that had not had the same issues.
"TasWater have admitted that over the testing period over the last few years, that there has at times been elevated lead levels in the actual water supply itself," he said. "Their argument is that you can't isolate it purely to the infrastructure when they know for a fact in the past there has been higher lead levels in the actual supply than what there should have been."