22 May 2007

There are no environmental flows sayeth Hargreaves

| johnboy
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In a media release in which he mispells his own name (see image below) John Hargreaves would have us believe that environmental flows have made no difference to our water situation.

“If every single litre of water that had left the ACT in the form of environmental flows since 2003 had been withheld, Canberra would be facing a similar situation to the one it faced today”

The trouble with something as concrete as water is that it leaves little room for detached spin wankers to work with, either it’s there or it’s not.

But if you would believe a man who can’t spell his own name then all the water that we have expelled from our dams has not actually left!

In which case one has to wonder if we have met our obligations at all.

We have obligations to the rest of the system and environmental flows are part of that, but let’s not lie to the public and suggest that we can release water from our emptying dams without having lost water.

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For the purposes of calculating the required environmental flows I don’t think the water pumped into Googong from Cotter would count.

Caf – since the water transfer scheme started operating between the Cotter and Googong, I would presume that there are inflows of at least that much every day. If there aren’t, what was the point in spending millions on the transfer scheme?

Remember that our consumption is something on the order of 40 – 50 GL / year. (And your figure is worst-case, assuming that there are 0.01GL/day of inflows into Googong every day).

Sorry, Cotter dam is 3.86Gl, not Corin.

Based on their information, I have calculated that 5.475GL is released from the ACT system as environmental flows each year. This is not an insignificant amount – Corin dam is only 3.86GL when full.

In addition, where are the new dams??????? There have been no new dams in Australia in 25 years – the population hasnt stayed the same.

Do we all just keep drinking from the same bucket until the bucket is empty, or do we get some more buckets?

Someone said the other day that new dams would do nothing because they dont create water and therefore you cant store what you dont have.

“Even if we had had a policy of releasing nothing at all in the form of environmental flows, water would still have had to be released from these catchments as they filled and overflowed,”

These dams are overflowing and yet they still have done nothing in relation to extra storage capacity.

As for down stream – if you want to grow rice and cotton in the middle of the hay plain, dont whinge when there is no water.

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