The Otago Regional Council is pushing the boat out to improve the safety and efficiency of water testing.
The council’s environmental monitoring team spent $99,000 of their allocated budget to buy three remote-controlled boats for testing rivers and streams around the Otago region.
Made by an Australia-owned company Surfbee, the "autonomous gauging boats" would help the team gather data on the volume and velocity of water.
Environmental monitoring manager Eve Bruhns described the boats as a "massive timesaving mechanism".
"Once this is set up and ready to go, we could literally pick it up, pop it on the truck, move on to our next site. Go to the next site, put it in the water, finish, get back in the truck, and on to the next."
The old system was a complex process which involved staff submerging into the water with flow-trackers and various equipment such as A-frames, flying foxes, kayaks, fishing rods and gauging rods.
The team had limited options when river currents pick up and would often rely on a helicopter attached by a cable to an unmanned kayak which carried the current flow measuring device.
She explained that the price of the boats were "not that expensive".
"I know it sounds expensive. But similar models on the market are around $60,000 to $70,000. We got these ones for $33,000, so its a bit of a steal really."
The monitoring team cover all of Otago with 22 staff members spread across 79 testing sites in the region.
"It’s a massive network that we are looking after. It’s quite a lot of work.
"Every time we get something that makes our lives a little bit easier or allows us to do more in a day, I think that’s a way of saving for the public too."
The team keeps a constant record of the data they collect from Otago rivers and streams which are accessible through their Environmental Data Portal website.
"We’ve been very lucky. We [are] very safety conscious and this is another step in our safety."
