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Evening Star, Issue 17312, 27 March 1920, Page 6

L'p to date the capital cost of the total waterworks of DunWhy Lee Stream? edin amounts to a few pounds under £423,000. Of this amount the Silverstream scheme stands in the books at £87,000. The City engineer tells us that Dunedin'.= daily consumption of water amounts to 5,000,000 gallons, giving the extraordinarily high average of 77 gallons per head per day for those in the reticulated area. There is reason to doubt whether the consumption is as great as we are told. Where a town has a sewerage pumping system, the amount pumped is always regarded as a key to the water consumption, and the records at the Drainage Board pumping station at Musselburgh indicate that the 5,000,000 gallons daily consumption is an exaggeration. Mr W. N. Blair, C.E., who reported on the Silverstream sclfeme in 1877, and again in 1883, when it was under way, gauged the streams draining about 10,000° acres of the Silverstream gathering ground at the end of a 40-day drought, and found a daily- discharge, of nearly 6,000,000 gallons, of which Silverstream proper gave 2,100,000 gallons, and its three tributaries in Whaie Flat gave 1,500,000 gallons. He stated that by impounding numerous smaller creeks along the course of the race, and by making use of Powder creek and the water it brings from the western side of Silverstream, the gathering ground could be increased from 10,000 acres to 15,000 acres (which is more than that of Liverpool with its 600,000 inhabitants). A 50 per cent, increase in the catchment area should mean a 50 per cent, increase in the discharge of water. Thus Silverstream, properly utilised, should supplv 7,500,000 gallons a day. Dunediu's daily consumption, * we repeat, is at most 5,000,000 gallons.

Not all the amount impounded, however, can reach the reservoir, becauso of loss in transit along the'race. The Silverstream race is designed to carry a maximum flow of. 8,000.000 to 10,000,000 gallons a day (vide .Mr Blair's report). If that amount were put into it at the intake by no means all of it- would reach the Southern Reservoir. The race leaks like a sieve. Mr Blair said in 1877 : " It is not proposed to line or pitch the Silverstream race at present, but this can be done when the demand increases and the finances of the City permit of the additional expenditure." It has never been done. Silverstream has been .the Cinderella of the Dunedin schemes. Why go to Lee Stream? Some people state that £IB,OOO was thrown away there a dozen years ago on an uncompleted tunnel, and that some use should be made of what now represents wasted or idle capital. But it is evident, from tho way the City authorities have neglected and discredited Silverstream, that they would abandon the latter. By doing so they would be flinging away what represents n capital expenditure of £87,000 —which is a bigger sum than £IB,OOO. That, however, is'nothing to the £162,000 of fresh expenditure for Lee stream which the council ask'the ratepayers to authorise on Tuesday. Hardly anyone believes thai sum would suffice. The estimates unofficial

rang© from £200,000 to £300,000. And all this to bring in a supply of water about equal in quantity and very much inferior in quality to that which ought to be got from Silverstream! How high do councillors rato the intelligence of the citizens? Also, how high do citizens rate the intelligence of their councillors ?