Yarra Valley Water services 1.9 million people and more 50,000 businesses across a 4,000 square kilometre region in Melbourne.
Since 2015, Ventia has partnered with Yarra Valley Water to deliver mechanical and electrical, civil maintenance and capital works services across its entire water and sewer network, including pump stations, tanks, reservoirs and treatment plants. This contract is the largest of its kind in Victoria.
Supporting the field teams is our National Operations Centre, which handles out-of-hours and weekend customer calls.
Important measures of this contract are customer experience and response times.
Based on these measures, the Ventia and Yarra Valley Water partnership has been a success with year-on-year response times reducing and customer satisfaction results improving. These result from the strong communication and partnership approach between Ventia and Yarra Valley Water.
Civil Services
Water network
Delivering timely solutions for Yarra Valley Water's customers is the primary focus of our civil water crews. Operating out of two depots our civil operations team delivers 24/7 reactive maintenance.
- Activities commonly completed under this contract include:
- Repair of burst and leaking water mains,
- Repair of defective and leaking valves
- Flushing of water mains
- Repair and renewal of domestic water services to the customer's meter
- Repair, reset and adjustment of hydrants
- Repair and replacement of customer meters
- Customer service calls relating to water quality, asset failures, complaints, inspections, operational and routine maintenance
- Response and rectification to high and low pressure situations
- Programmed valve and hydrant insertions
- Fire hydrant inspection, repair and maintenance
- Boundary valve inspection and replacement.
Sewer network
Ventia's specialised sewer team delivers planned and unplanned work on Yarra Valley Water's sewer network.
The crews attend to enquiries from customers or the general public to address asset failures, customer complaints and routine maintenance activities. The most common work delivered by this team includes:
- Sewer blockage clearance
- Asset inspection, often using CCTV
- Preventative sewer main cleaning
- Repair or replacement of sewer mains, pipes and connection branches.
Mechanical & Electrical (M&E) Services
- Comprised of Mechanical Fitters, Electricians and Instrument Technicians the Yarra Valley Water M&E team services and maintains approximately:
- 85 sewer pumping stations
- 230 water pumping, pressure reducing and storage reservoirs
- 12 sewer treatment plants
- Over 200 remotely monitored sewer and water assets.
Each one of these assets is monitored by a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to detect any abnormalities within the network. Ventia's SCADA Network Intelligence Specialist works with the Yarra Valley Water Optimisation Teams to monitor the SCADA system.
In most cases, the Ventia M&E team work directly with Yarra Valley Water on their foundation infrastructure, rather than with the end customer.
"Fostering and maintaining a strong working relationship with our client is critical to the team and has a real impact on efficiency," said Peter Bell, Operations Manager of Ventia's M&E business.
From July 2018 to June 2019 the M&E team completed over 11,000 work orders that included:
- routine sewer wet well cleans
- routine pressure reducing valve maintenance
- instrument calibrations
- unblocking sewer pumps
- maintaining multiple sewer treatment assets
- motor faults
- anchor point testing
- emergency relief structure testing
- conditions reporting
- small- to mid-sized electrical and mechanical upgrades.
Quoted (Capital) Works
Our Quoted Works crews are kept busy with an array of scheduled capital works that aims to keepYarra Valley Water's water and wastewater network functioning smoothly.
The team is currently delivering two larger programs: tank inspections and sewer vent tube replacement.
Tank inspection program
Our on-site specialist crew inspects tanks or service reservoirs. Tanks are an essential part of the water delivery network and are primarily used for water storage and providing adequate water pressure to residents and businesses.
The inspections are necessary to maintain and control the water quality delivered to Yarra Valley Water customers and to ensure integrity of the asset. To maintain water quality, the tanks must be sealed so no foreign matter infiltrates them. Read more about the tank inspection project here.
Sewer vent tube replacement program
Over the past 18 months Ventia has replaced approximately 220 steel sewer vent pipes. Scattered throughout Yarra Valley Water's network, the vent tubes provide essential ventilation to the underground sewer network. Many of the tubes are over 50 years old and need replacement to maintain structural integrity and effectiveness.
When undertaking the replacement work, our crews also check the integrity of the connecting 'air line' - the pipe that runs from the sewer to the vent tube. In many cases, this pipe also needs replacing which entails open trenching in roads and nature strips to complete the job.
In addition to these larger programs, the Quoted Works team also delivers:
- pressure sewer air valve replacements
- civil services, including concreting and pavement works, at pumping stations reservoir sites
- sewer manhole location and height maintenance - often required for redeveloped sites
- external drop pipe conversions into sewer manholes
- GPS asset location, and
- recycled water cross connection removals.
Ventia's partnership approach with Yarra Valley Water means we are always working together to identify new opportunities to further improve customer service and efficiencies, and to ultimately reduce supply disruptions of this critical resource to the community.
