Cotter Dam to be made much bigger

You are right though – the slug in the works is the wee factory is going to be built under the guise of Cotter Dam improvement.

Anybody with a fetish for drinking wee should not be a parliamentary representative.

mojo: Actually, the Cotter Dam has access to 193 square kilometres of catchment that doesn’t feed the two higher dams. This provides 36 GL/yr of inflow that isn’t available to the other two dams. Currently much of that is lost from the system due to the Cotter’s small capacity.

Check this report out.

Enlarging the Cotter Dam adds to our storage capacity but doesn’t add a single litre of inflow. The Cotter Dam is on a river that already has 2 other dams that arn’t full! Maybe if it does eventually rain they will all fill but as soon as the dry times come again the inflow will not be adequate to satisfy demand and we will be back on restrictions again as the dam levels drop. It will just take 18 months instead of 12. Now why has Stanhope done this? Could it be that he has gone for the Cotter solution because it fits with his real plan of pumping recycled sewage back into the water supply ….?

JC – it falls on your roof, you capture it, you put it on your garden.

Alternative 2 – it falls on the ground, it finds its way to a catchment, it is piped to a water treatment facility, it is piped to a water tower, it is piped to your house, you put it on your garden.

Happy to lecture more, but do some maths and think about it a little…

Mr Hargraeves: $130 rate rise per 140,000 Canberra Households per year means it will take 15 years to pay for the $260 million to be spent on water.

So if a project costs 1 billion to build over say 5 years that means my rates will rise by what $400 to $500 per year ON TOP of the $130 that you will slug us for water?

Lord, how do you work that out. The way I see it, it falls on my roof, it goes into the drain and ends up in the river system somewhere. If I install a tank, it goes onto my lawn or garden and doesn’t end up futher down stream, instead gets evaporated as it is a smaller body of water than the river.

Your theory would be correct if people were replacing their ACTEW supply soley with tanks but they aren’t, they are supplimenting it. Sure they may be drawing less but I would doubt the amount would be less than what the are catching in tanks, so end result is less downstream.

(which is why the Angle Crossing Murrumbidgee-to-Googong pipeline is also being built).

Yes, if you read the Future Water Options reports, it was pretty clear that the new Cotter Dam was a no-brainer. The report does make clear that it won’t be enough on its own, though.

Thumper, I suspect that some of the delay may have been associated with background work and preliminary assessments – There’s been a lot of that happening in relation to the Cotter component over the past six months.

JC – take that back!

Stormwater diversion offsets a whole heap of potable water consumption – I forget the figure but the ratio is something like 2:1. That means that by employing sw diversion (ie by installing tanks), extraction rates from existing water supplies is reduced twofold for every part of water diverted (pardoning my errant sentence structure).

Installing tanks will INCREASE the amount of enviro flow.