FUTURE NEEDS IN WATER SUPPLY

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 103, 3 May 1919, Page 4

FUTURE NEEDS IN WATER SUPPLY

Mr. J. M. Dale's advocacy of the better utilisation of the City's watercatchment reserves, from the forestry: standpoint, deserves more than passing attention. Probably a fair number of residents of Wellington are more or less familiar with the Karori Reserve, which is mainly an ex-cowfarm now overgrown with long grass, but in which, thanks to the City Engineer, the beginnings of forestry exist. These beginnings consist of lines of pines on the higher slopes and ridges, and some of them already enhance the view from the City by giving character to the Karori sky-line. But the much greater reserve at Wainui-o-mata, to which the Orongorongo will be a new and important addition, is to most Wellington people almost a terra incognita. Mr. Dale reminds the electors that Wellington has no less than 11,763 acres of watercatchment,1 which, he says, is under heavy scrub, and is productive of unused firewood, but not of the timber that it is quite capable of producing. His.proposal is to utilise the firewood, and at the same time to afforest or re-forest the. ground, with a view to (1) increasing humus, decreasing evaporation, and improving the area for water conservation; and (2) providing a commercial forest on lines successfully adopted in the water-conserva-tion reservations of older countries. It is hardly necessary to add that fuel, timber, and -water are all leading items in. the cost of living. Lack of water-supply in certain districts has, within the last year, prevented the erection of new houses, and this remark applies, to one part of the old Melrose Borough—the first of the Greater Wellington acquisitions— and to a sea-level part at that. The fact that housing in Wellington depends on water brought from beyond the Hutt Valley is one more proof of the interdependence of Wellington and its surrounding disti'icts.

As time goes on, the needs of the growing populations of Greater. Wellington and of the.Hutt Valley will exceed the water supply, even with Orongorongo added; and it is time that the inhabitants of City and Valley began to ask themselves whether a new catchment area on the headwaters of the Hutt River, or on one of its tributaries, should not be reserved from settlement. Perhaps the existing Government reserve at the head of the Hutt is already, sufficient to pre-' serve those waters in potable quantity; but distance is a handicap upon this source of supply, and it may therefore be necessary to utilise one of the nearer tributaries. On the Mungaroa, the way is barred by settlement; on the Akatarawa, a similar state of things prevails for at least twelve miles of the stream's course; but on the Whakatiki there is still time to do something, for the upper waters of this important stream run through intact bush. It therefore becomes an important question whether the municipality should not take early steps to reserve the upper valley of the Whakatiki, before the advance of settlement has made this area- a much more costly and at the same time (from the water conservation standpoint) a much less valuable asset. In the absence of a satisfactory survey of the Whakatiki basin (even the standard survey is sketchy) it is difficult to say. how much private land would need to be bought; but experience elsewhere shows that the time to buy it, if it is to bs bought, is now. Possibly not much financial outlay would be needed, for it seems that another Government reserve— that which begins near Paraparaumu—• already protects a great part of the required watershed. In this valley, viewed as a potential water supply, timber, and fuel proposition, the Hutt people are at least as interested as those of the City. Has riot the time arrived when a joint committee of the City Council and surrounding local bodies should be appointed to consider the whole question of water supply, in which, as in transport, their interdependence is absolute?