Italian Flood Pump Comes To The Rescue

Flooding is not only an inconvenience to dairy and dry stock farmers. It can cost them hugely in damaged pastures.

If farmland stays under water long enough, the pasture has to then be ploughed, resown and animals given supplementary feed while the grass grows, which is not a good position for dairy farmers to be in when the new milking season is just around the corner.

However, if one good thing has come out of the recent flooding, it has been the trial by fire, or more aptly water, of a powerful and efficient new pumping system.

The DODA Pump, an Italian designed and manufactured pump imported by Morrinsville company Hi-Tech Enviro Solutions, was put on the job by Cartertons specialist rural electrical and pumping team G V Electrical Ltd.

In less than a week, the pump successfully cleared hundreds of hectares of flooded land between Lake Wairarapa and the Rumahanga Diversion.

G V Electrical Ltd has been responsible for electrical maintenance of the pumps for the Lower Valley Flood Scheme for a number of years.

While these continued to work throughout the period of the recent flooding, they had no impact on nearby flooded farmland that was separated from the drainage system by a road.

G V Electrical director Gordon Mouldey had already been in close contact with farmers affected by the flooding for more than a week when he got a call asking if he would bring down one of the pumps, which are new to the market, from Morrinsville.

“We rung for the pump that night and had it on site by 10am the next morning.”

“We then had to come up with a plan as to how we were going to get this water across the road.”

“The water was so high on both sides we wouldn’t dig through the road as the water would have flowed back again.”

“So we had to put a pipe across the top of the road and build up a metal ramp on both sides of it so the road could still be used.”
“The local contractors were excellent. They rallied around and produced diggers, trucks, metal and people.”

Powered by one of the farmers’ tractors, the pump kept pumping 24 hours a day so that by the end of the week, enough water had been sucked out to allow the pasture to dry.

While the farming community in the lower Wairarapa were thankfully forward thinking many years ago, the pumps they installed are now 30 to 40 years old and were never made to handle the demands of severe flooding like that just experienced, Mr Mouldey says.

“What is quite special about the DODA pumps is the volume of water they can move for a portable pump. A single pump can shift up to four million litres of water per hour.”

“They’re designed to be placed quite easily and quickly into a flood drain or the side of a paddock anywhere.”

“When they are not needed you can pack them up, put them in a shed, and be ready for next time.”

Ranging in cost from approximately $12,000 each to $39,000, Mr Mouldey believes they are worth the expense for farmers who are at risk.

“It’s a case of cost versus the savings. When farmers lose their land under water they have the problems of where do they put their stock, how do they feed them, and how long is that water going to be there.”

“There’s the direct cost of reclaiming the pasture and the cost of feeding the stock in the meantime.”

“If we can get the water off in a week and keep the existing grass growing, or even recover a large percentage of it, then you’re saving months of time it is going to take new grass to grow, as well as the other costs.”

“Really, it is a very cheap insurance policy. And they are a very simple piece of equipment to install and maintain.”

“They can’t stop the flood but they allow the farmer to deal with the problem."