Keith Lewis, as E&WS chief, brings public health engineering to South Australia and national water care
Keith Lewis, through his involvement in national water bodies, was able to get funding for Adelaide's River Torrens linear park as part of flood mitigation.
Keith Lewis, chief executive of the Engineering and Water Supply (E&WS) department of South Australia 1970-87, was a leading influence on the water industry within the state and nationally.
Lewis started his bachelor of engineering/civil part-time at Adelaide University until 1949 when a E&WS cadetship allowed him to finish other subjects in public health engineering that became a hallmark of his career. Lewis also won a Rockefeller Foundation grant to attend London University, Imperial College, in 1954-545 also to study public health engineering.
Although the E&WS has been integral to premier Tom Playford’s era of keeping down state charges and supporting industry with projects such as the Morgan-Whyalla pipeline, Lewis became director general of the department in 1970 when it was still trying to catchup with a backlog of work delayed by World War II.
Lewis has been involved in designing state-wide water treatment works for all over South Australia. He had seen the need for water pollution controls in the face of urban growth and also the need to fix the depleting of groundwater that was becoming a serious problem on the northern Adelaide plains.
Lewis saw the need for South Australia water to have an overall strategy and a legal framework, beyond the previous Waterworks Act, to manage it. This came when he drafted the South Australian Water Resources Act, passed by parliament in 1976. It provided for the South Australian Water Resources Council, that water minister Des Corcoran appointed Lewis to chair, with regional committees giving a voice to the vested interests in critical areas such as the North Adelaide plains.
As a member of the River Murray Commission, Lewis made effective and revolutionary national contributions to bodies such as the Australian Water Resources Council, bringing in environment and agricultural expertise into managing the Murray-Darling basin.
A bonus benefit gained by Lewis was to convince the federal government to fund the River Torrens linear park as part of flood mitigation during the term of David Tonkin’s government (1979-82). Lewis continued overseeing more water treatment and filtration plants, plus projects such as the Murray Bridge–Hahndorf pipeline – not used much in its first years before it was followed by years of good rainfall in South Australia.