Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Market Research and Unhealthy Rivers: David Boyd

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The market researchers/analysts tell me that you wont win a “counter-intuitive” argument. Because people have been conditioned by repetitive claims of a particular point of view, to forthrightly state the opposite is likely to be dismissed out of hand. So they advise coming at the issue in a more subtle or different way. Sorry,but I am just not built that way! I like to think that I seek after truth and get emotionally upset when I see claims that I regard as untruthful. I do understand that there are deep philosophical arguments about what is truth, but let’s keep it simple.

The debate about our inland rivers is a good example. It seems to me that the (conditioned) starting point for most commentators is that it is taken as a given that “our rivers are unhealthy and that this is due to taking too much water out of them”. The MDB Plan certainly starts from that accepted position. I think that both the lack of health and the excessive extraction claims, are untrue. (And this is where your counter-intuition is triggered and I’ve lost you!) But, please read on…

at David Boyd’s Blog

The Whole Truth: Water Deliberately Dumped into Flooded Area

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SNOWY Hydro chief executive, Terry Charlton, recently confirmed that water was dumped into the already flooded Murray-Darling Basin, but said the authority had little choice (The Australian, December 15, 2010, page 7).   A real time operational diagram, however, tells a very different story.

Last Wednesday, Snowy Hydro could have sent water into Eucumbene dam.  At only 20 percent it had a storage capacity of a whopping 4 cubic kilometres of water.

Instead, the water managers set the trans-mountain tunnels so water was flowing away from Lake Eucumbene at over 80 cubic metres per second (6,912 megalitres for Wednesday).

Water was filling Talbingo and forcing releases from Jounama pondage into the already spilling Blowering Dam, threatening the township of Tumut and adding to the crisis along the Murrumbidgee River.

As if this wasn’t enough, the real time operational diagram for Wednesday December 8, 2010, shows that this water, drawn from Eucumbene, was also being used by Murray electricity generators pushing even more water directly into the Murray Darling Basin.

“Mr Charlton was incorrect in saying that generation was only from inflows below Eucumbene last Wednesday, although they were large at the time,” a source told me this morning.

“Why weren’t Mr Charlton’s water managers pushing the water back for storage into Eucumbene from the Tumut system,” he asked.

Tumut River residents were issued with urgent evacuation orders last Thursday after the increase in outflows.

Desperate farmers phoned Snowy Hydro last week asking why flood waters were being sent west, rather than east to Lake Eucumbene, given this dam was less than half full, but their calls were ignored.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was built for the storage and diversion of water with hydropower generation as a by product.

Current and past employees claim that the current board and management are now driven almost exclusively by money.

“The management are setting the business up for sale when the NSW government changes next year,” said one source. “They want the balance sheet to look as good as possible so [we] are generating [power] like mad, even when electricity prices are low and irrespective of downstream impacts.”

Save Lake Eucumbene’s Frogs

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ANGLERS fishing Lake Eucumbene in late October 2010 were pleased to see that the rising waters of the lake had created perfect spawning conditions for the frogs. 

Frogs were in abundance and their future was assured through this massive spawning event, or so we thought.

By early November the water in the lake ceased rising and began to fall, yet the State was in flood and the rains continued, how could this be? 

More importantly anglers watched as the frog spawn was left high and dry.  The baby tadpoles yet to hatch suffered a miserable death by dehydration.  Caring anglers scurried around the lake margin; lifting spawn blobs and putting them back into the water, only to see the whole miserable cycle continue as the waters relentlessly receded. 

How many frog larvae died we will never know, but the receding waters killed far more frogs than any number of trout possibly could – even the deadly chytrid fungus would have been hard pressed to match this slaughter.

For the whole of November an early December the rains fell, the State flooded but Lake Eucumbene continued to fall. 

[Read more…] about Save Lake Eucumbene’s Frogs

City Deal That Led to Water Waste: Ross Tyson

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“AN ARCHAIC agreement hatched in the air-conditioned suites of a Sydney office block has exposed the kind of chronic mismanagement at government level that is driving local farmers to the point of despair.

“The revelation this week that Snowy Hydro is sending millions of litres of water downstream every day into overflowing dams and flood-affected towns along the Murrumbidgee River has left irrigators dumbfounded.

Read more at Area News.

  [Read more…] about City Deal That Led to Water Waste: Ross Tyson

Government to Finally Act on Bureaucratic Flooding

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FINALLY, last night, the NSW government agreed to change Snowy Hydro Licence conditions which required water to be released into the already swollen Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers –exacerbating the current flood crisis.  

The article in today’s The Australian newspaper (page 7), indicating licence conditions will be changed, quotes Terry Charlton, CEO of Snowy Hydro, denying that recent flooding was exacerbated by licence conditions.

This comment from Mr Charlton is disingenuous, contradicts comment he made to me in a telephone conversation yesterday, and also comment he made to former employees of Snowy Hydro at a meeting in Cooma on November 25, 2010, that even though Blowering and Hume dams were spilling, Snowy Hydro still had to release water from Lake Eucumbene because of licence conditions.

How Much Should One Frog Eat?

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THE green tree frog, with the white lip, that I fed last night is currently asleep outside my kitchen window.  

Last night she – I call her Emily – ate four grasshoppers, two moths, one bush cockroach, one click-beetle, but refused the squirming earthworm I held out for her.

I understand it is easy to overfed a frog.  

There are lots of grasshoppers in my veggie garden at the moment which I can easily collect during the day and keep alive in a container for Emily when she wakes up around 7pm.   But, how many should I feed her each night?  

Picture taken by Neil Hewett of a frog like Emily in the Daintree.

And please, spare me the response from the public servants – who for mostly just sitting on their bums each day get money regularly fed into their Sydney bank accounts – that Emily should actually go hunting for her own food in the wilds of the adjacent nature reserve.