Rehabilitating the PFAS impacted site at the former CFA training college at Fiskville, Victoria is one of Australia's most significant rehabilitation projects and will help inform how we manage these compounds at other sites around the country.

In addition to rehabilitating the site, Ventia's Environmental Services Monitoring team are performing real-time weather and surface water monitoring, as well as groundwater monitoring.

By measuring and reporting information in a meaningful way and having set-point alarms, the team can manage storage levels across the site.

The team has installed monitoring equipment and software that is measuring the total water balance across the extensive Fiskville site in real-time. This includes flow in the Beremboke Creek that runs through the site, plus monitoring water levels in four dams as well as Lake Fiskville. 

A fully automated weather station installed near Lake Fiskville provides meteorological data including air temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, barometric pressure, solar radiation and rainfall.
 
The capture of this information is displayed visually on operational dashboards on an internally hosted website. This information allows the Ventia rehabilitation team and other parties to determine, at a glance:

  • the spillway point for each of the storages against the current level
  • the flow in Beremboke Creek
  • volumes used and available in each of the storage dams and Lake Fiskville
  • volumes being discharged from the treatment plant, as well as
  • the trend for the water balance across the site.

Each water body has an SMS alarm set-point for its spillway level that automatically informs the project team if the storage is potentially going to be breached due to a rainfall event.