After waiting more than a year for works to begin due to COVID-19 delays, the works have finally started, and will connect six houses, the Nanneella Estate Primary School, and the Nanneella Hall to a new water supply.
Brett Gledhill, Nanneella Community Incorporated president and long-time Nanneella local, petitioned for the works for six or seven years before they were approved.
“I’ve been working on the stock and domestic water project for six or seven years now, and I finally got it through with the help of Richard Anderson from Goulburn-Murray Water, Kevin Laffey has been heavily involved in the design as the project manager, and Peter Walsh and Damian Drum,” Mr Gledhill said.
“We’ve battled and battled, and there were all these scenarios about how they were going to do it, and I told them ‘no, this is how you need to do it’.
“Ward Bros Earthmoving from Rochester won the contract to install (the system), and the money has come from a federal grant from the Murray-Darling Basin Small Communities grants.
“It’s owned under the G-MW Authority, they own it and they’ll maintain it going forward.
“There’s half a dozen houses that will be connected, the school, the hall, the store, and the reserve, so we’ll be able to make Nanneella green again.”
Until these works, residents of Nanneella had been filling a hundred-year-old dam to water their land and stock.
“It’s time for an upgrade,” Mr Gledhill said.
“There’s a pipe that goes around to the dam and we’d have to fill it every 10 days, because we kept running out of water, and to stop it from smelling.
“Because of it’s age, it was having trouble filling up.”
The new works will immensely help the Nanneella Estate Primary School in keeping its grounds green and the plants thriving.
“We’re using portable sprinklers at the school because our supply is poor at the moment,” school principal Tom Mangan said.
“Once we have a consistent supply, we’ll be able to use the automatic sprinklers in the oval, we’ll have water nearly all year round.”
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