AS the irrigation season nears its end, Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) is ramping up water theft enforcement to ensure customers get their fair share of winter water supply.
Water compliance and enforcement coordinator, Chris Dalton, said GMW is seeking to reduce the amount of water illegally taken from its channels and storage.
“We’ve really upped our prosecutions. We want people to know that if they do the wrong thing there are going to be consequences.”
He said that penalty infringement notices have simplified the process, while GMW’s water management systems ensure it could detect different types of illegal water use, the most prominent being ununauthorised take.
“That is when someone who has an entitlement takes more water than they’re entitled to,” he said. “We have customers who tamper or interfere with the metres so that they don’t correctly record the water that they’re taking. We also have people who drill illegal pipe into our channels to take that water away.”
“Prosecutions can at times be long and costly, whereas penalty infringement notices are nice and simple. We can just fine someone, and that deterrent message gets delivered a lot more quickly.”
“We have really good water management systems and if someone has done something like that, sooner or later it shows up in our system as these discrepancies of why the water that left point A didn’t get to point B in the same volume.”
When more water has been taken than is authorised, Mr Dalton said GMW has allowed a small window of time to correct the behaviour.
“But on the other hand, we’re not messing around. Where people choose not to respond or choose not to do the right thing, then we’re getting on with it and we’re moving to something like a penalty infringement notice or, if the offence is serious enough, we might go straight to prosecution as well.”
