It was transported by recalcitrant truck drivers and put together by hard men in the Great Depression to sate the thirst of a worried city. It is the Deep Creek pipeline, an engineering marvel that springs from a frozen fold in the earth. David Loughrey investigates.
The year 1935 was almost certainly a difficult year for the relationship between Mr Chas and Mr F. Brenssell.
History does not share with the modern day the familial ties binding this Depression-era pair.
Perhaps they were brothers - feuding, roughneck brothers who worked hard and played mean on the frozen hills that long winter.
Perhaps they were father and son; men of trucking yards and steel pipes, rivets, grit, tyres and mud.
They were trucking men, that is certain, and if they were father and son there were probably some blue words spoken between the two - very blue - over events 80 years ago.
The Brenssells pop up in the very well-kept records of our city infrastructure on July 24, 1935.
Chas Brenssell, of Outram, had a contract to truck the steel pipes for the Deep Creek pipeline, a development planned to bolster Dunedin's limited water supply.
He evidently employed Mr F. Brenssell as the man behind the wheel.
Perhaps he should have thought more carefully about that decision.
On July 24, a letter was sent to city engineer G. Alexander about Mr F. Brenssell's work.
It reads: ''From the commencement of this Contract, our tally clerk has had trouble with Mr F. Brenssell, one of the truck drivers employed by Mr Chas. Brenssell.
''The driver is of the 'rip and tear' type, and has been carting and laying pipes in any old fashion, but not in sequence.''
Mr F. admitted three pipes had fallen off his truck in transit.
A Mr Lane had, that very day, spoken to him about his methods, with the following result: ''F. Brenssell became very cheeky and finally informed Mr Lane that he would do what he liked and refused to take any instructions from the field staff.
''F. Brenssell's language was very 'blue'.''
It is, perhaps, not surprising Mr Chas Brenssell received a letter on July 25, 1935, calling on him to dismiss his employee (under General Conditions of Contract, paragraph 21 - Dismissal of Workmen) within 24 hours.
That dismissal may have occurred - then again, it may not have.
All we know is the very next year some very similar problems were still in evidence in the Brenssell camp.
On March 24, 1936, the city engineer found himself still complaining to Mr Chas Brenssell of dents in pipes after haulage on his trucks that ''appear to have been done by dropping the pipe on a boulder''.
Cheeky, foul-mouthed truck drivers were not the only hitch the city engineer faced as the Deep Creek pipeline was built.
Blasting operations for the water main as it approached Wakari Rd in 1936 drew the ire of Mr R. Stedman.
With 730 eggs (more or less) in incubators, Mr Stedman strongly advised the council should any loss or damage result from blasting ''I will claim for such damage or loss''.
''No blasting done. No complaints received'' reads a note above the stamp of the City Engineers Office at the bottom of R. Stedman's letter.
None of these issues, of course, stopped the inevitable march of Dunedin infrastructure.
In 1934, parties of unemployed men headed west to excavate the trench for the bitumen-coated, hessian-wrapped steel pipe provided under contract by the Hume Steel Company.
The pipe was taken by rail to Otago Central railway stations - Mr F. Brenssell, for instance, picked up his load from the Hindon station before carting and laying the pipes in any old fashion, but not in sequence.
In just a little more than two years - by December 1936 - these hardy souls had laid their pipeline all the way from the Lammerlaw Range to the city, bringing the precious sparkling waters of the high country to parched residents struggling through the Depression.
Today, the Deep Creek pipeline still fires water from a small, roughly carved gorge that cuts a rocky wound in the eastern slopes of the Lammerlaws.
Its intake, by a small, freezing dam, is a place of rare and striking beauty, particularly in winter.
Off the old Dunstan Rd near Clarks Junction, through tussock-covered hills and vast fields studded with giant swedes can be located the beginning of a 1.6km walk to the intake.
There, beauty is tempered by the practicalities of infrastructure, with recently built sheds that have something to do with regulator flow and turbidity control, inverter distribution and terminations.
A tiny computer screen shows rainfall, water level, wind speed and valve position, while outside water bubbles through a device that removes debris.
Beyond those the 1.6km walk takes you deeper and deeper into the small gorge, through snow and past fearsome diamond-tipped icicles.
Ice forms on the calmer sections of a sometimes angry, always busy, brackish waterway.
The rock on each side is so steep it is only loosely clothed in a thin layer of soil, on to which stubborn plants cling fast.
At track's end is the dam, and the beginning of a pipe that twists 64km back to the city, dropping 675m on the way to sea level.
It is excellent.
It is the legacy of hard-working formerly unemployed men, difficult, cheeky, expletive-ridden truck drivers, concerned poultry farmers, put-upon tally clerks and one surely exasperated city engineer.
And those are the sorts of things, in 1936 and today, that make up the good city of Dunedin.