SA Water Corporation (SA Water) commenced a Bushfires Preparedness Program following the 2020 SA ‘Black Summer’ bushfires which served to identify and mitigate bushfire risks at priority sites throughout outer metropolitan and regional South Australia. SA Water commissioned Consulting Services to review the bushfire preparedness of critical sites located in the High Risk hazard areas as published by the SA Property and Planning Atlas, which are shown in Figure 1 below for context.

Per site reports were prepared by a consultant which identify compliance gaps to applicable industry guidelines and provide a scope outline for remedial works in accordance with AS/ISO31000 (2018). SA Water subsequently undertook vegetation surveys to establish what level of vegetation removal could practically be undertaken taking into account legislative, environmental compliance and stakeholder requirements.

SA Water have run a vegetation removal and asset retrofitting program of works over the past three years, through which a portion of the works recommended by the consulting assessments have been delivered. SA Water published TS 0601 in 2022 which details SA Water’s minimum requirements for design, assessment and asset retrofitting so as to minimise the risk of damage from the effects of bushfire attacks. Given this standard has not been applied on this program to date, there is a need to review previous BAL assessments and recommendations against the requirements of TS 0601.

SAW is now seeking services of a bushfire assessor and design consultant (the Consultant) to review the sites previously assessed against the TS 0601 standard and vegetation removal constraints. The scope of work will consider only those sites in the 2022 bushfire assessment scope (up to approx. 250 sites), however additional sites may be included on a case by case basis. Subject to review of BAL and recommendations, SA Water will release sites identified for 60% concept design to the Consuttant from which point the works will be project managed by SA Waters Capital Delivery team.

Please note that SA Water now conducts its tender process using SA Water’s Supplier Portal. Please see the ‘How to access SA Water’s public requests for proposal’ instructions located under the ‘Specification Documents’ section to view the tender and participate in the RFx.

Supplier proposals MUST NOT be uploaded to SA Tenders & Contracts, MUST NOT be submitted as hardcopy, and instead must only be uploaded to SA Water’s Supplier Portal. Once you have downloaded and reviewed the instructions, please click on the link below:

https://supplierportal.sawater.com.au/page.aspx/en/rfp/request_browse_public