Omāroro Water Reservoir

Securing Wellington’s water supply for future generations.

Comprehensive water storage is a must for any major city. The new designed and built 35 million litre Omāroro reservoir we’re building will more than double Wellington’s water storage for the Wellington CBD and surrounding suburbs, making water supply more resilient to earthquakes and disruption.

Our work
Building – designed and built a new 70m diameter, 35 million litre buried concrete reservoir.

Connecting – the bulk inlet and outlet main that will eventually feed water to the reservoir.

Constructing – the pipe tunnel access point for the reservoir pipes, which is made from both precast and in-situ concrete works.

Fabricating – 60 wall panels and 45 roof support columns from pre-cast concrete for the reservoir.

Park and Landscape – reinstatement of the Prince of Wales Park including the sports field while protecting the native wildlife.

Sustainable Outcomes

One of the great environmental outcomes of this project was that it used far fewer emissions than originally designed. Through collaboration between HEB and partners, we redesigned the reservoir to cut 2,000 tonnes of CO2 – a 48% reduction.

Additional environmental strategies were also put in place to ensure a healthy outcome for the site despite the large amount of works taking place. These included rehoming local lizards to a new ‘lizard hotel’, filtering run-off, preventing contamination to nearby streams, controlling dust levels and fitting construction equipment with silencers.

On top of that, to give the local community a voice during construction, we employed a full-time community manager to coordinate with residents and sports field users, gaining their consent on certain changes to the project plan – which, in the end, helped us reduce traffic congestion.