Taranaki Street Rising Main
On behalf of Wellington City Council, we are building a major new wastewater rising main under Taranaki Street as part of our programme of work increasing the capacity and resilience of the city's wastewater network.
If you have any questions about this work, please contact:
Wellington Water, 04 912 4400
Latest Updates
Making great progress
Work commences Monday 21 August 2023 and is expected to take around 21 months to complete.
The work involves road and lane closures at different locations up Taranaki Street as the project progresses. Traffic management will be in place and we will be asking people who drive to consider other modes of transport, to take other routes where possible and travel outside peak times.
On-street parking in the area alongside the worksite will also be restricted to accommodate temporary traffic management.
However, thanks to innovative new trenchless equipment that G.P. Friel Ltd has imported for this project excavation will be kept to a minimum, reducing disruption and the need to remove waste from the site.
Hours of work will generally be 7:00am – 6:00pm Monday to Saturday. For specific aspects of the project, we may need to undertake some work during both days of the weekend or out of hours.
Why are we doing this?
This project is Stage 1 of a major programme of work called the CBD Wastewater Renewals and Upgrades, designed to ensure future resilience, support population growth and protect the environment.
The new Taranaki Street rising main - that's a pipe that carries wastewater under pressure - will allow wastewater to be diverted to the main interceptor, which carries wastewater to the Moa Point treatment plant. This will connect to the lower rising main system to provide continued service while the other rising mains are replaced in the future.
The project will also provide additional ‘redundancy’ in the system ensuring that if a problem arises such as a pipe burst or an upgrade is needed, there is capacity to pick up the load and store it or pump it via an alternative route to the interceptor
Check out other projects as part of this programme of work.
All Updates
We’ve had a great couple of weeks working around the Wakefield St intersection.
We have now installed a steel casing across the intersection by pipe ramming and cleaned out the casing ready to have this new major wastewater pipeline slipped through it.
Trenchless installations like this mean that we don’t have to dig up the busy traffic lanes of the intersection and create unnecessary disruption. They reduce the amount of waste that the project has to transport to landfill and result in a product that has a lower carbon footprint.
What's next
Over the next couple of weeks we will be constructing connection pipework and chambers in the current excavations and starting to backfill them back up to road level. On the northern side of the intersection we will be working to connect up the pipe to the previously laid section in Wakefield St East before we start crossing Taranaki St into Market Lane. On the southern side of the intersection we will be backfilling the existing excavation before starting to excavate and lay pipes towards Courtenay Place.
There is a lot of work to do and we will provide another update before we start moving the site around.
As ever, please take extra time for your journeys around the traffic management avoid the area if you can and follow the instructions of our onsite traffic management team.
Our project is planned to be complete in mid-2025.