Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Murray River

Conservatism and Inland Water Management: A Note from David Boyd

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I think it was John Howard who once described a conservative as someone who did not believe that everything his grandfather said was necessarily wrong!

Nobody could accuse present day water managers (bureaucrats and attention seeking scientific advocates)of being conservative. They appear to approach current issues from the clear position that their forebears didn’t really have a clue about what they were doing.

So much so, we now have a widespread “conventional wisdom” view that in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) our rivers are all “over allocated” and that this has given rise to their “ill-health”.(They conveniently overlook the fact that the “ill-health” was really the natural result of extreme dryness which Mother Nature has dramatically corrected over recent days.)

The much maligned forebears of these modern “dark green” commentators recognised the massive variability of the inland rivers of temperate Australia and devised a dynamic, adaptive, self correcting management system. Water licenses/entitlements were issued subject to seasonal allocations. Think of it sequentially-it rains, or it doesn’t. Our dams have plenty in storage or they don’t. Our water managers then, guided by long debated Water Management Plans, determine the percentage (if any) of the licensed amount which may be extracted.

This methodology allows account to be taken of environmental and critical human needs before any extractions for irrigation are allowed. It means that in a year when water is in short supply such as in 2008/9 only 3,500GL were extracted in the MDB, not the 13,700GL upper limit which the Guide to the Murray Darling Basin Plan keeps referring to.

Farmers understand the system and its logic and accept the risks involved. They also recognise the smoke screen of politicians talking about granting certainty. A concept totally foreign to Australian farming!

Likewise, they recognise the nonsense of asking the CSIRO to calculate the Sustainable Diversion Limits for each of the rivers. If “sustainable” means the “annual” amount that can always be extracted, then given the fact that all of our inland rivers,including the mighty Murray, sometimes actually stop flowing, then the limit must be placed at nil.

Faced with these variability issues the modern water managers then revert to using averages. Given the massive spreads around the average such mathematics quickly becomes meaningless.

All of this was well understood by those who devised the system. It is clearly not understood by those who glibly state that our rivers are over-allocated and advocate correcting the perceived problem by having the Government buy up water licenses without ever mentioning the role of seasonal allocations.

Oh for more conservatives!

Read more from David Boyd at http://davidboydsblog.blogspot.com/

Snowy Hydro Still in Denial: Ben Glover

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SNOWY Hydro has denied playing a role in exacerbating this month’s devastating floods despite a leaked document which appears to show that the authority released almost 7000 megalitres from Eucumbene Dam on December 8 – causing water levels to rise to peaks of close to 10 metres downstream in the Murrumbidgee.

Any water release from Eucumbene, floods or no floods, has raised eyebrows among a number of farmers and politicians, specifically because it is just over 20 per cent full, and Riverina MP Michael McCormack has labelled it “a disgrace”.

“It’s totally ridiculous to think that any dam would be releasing water when it’s nowhere near its capacity,” Mr McCormack said. “It’s totally incomprehensible that this would happen.”

The document in question, obtained by The Daily Advertiser this week, maps the inflows and outflows from each of the major dams on December 8 and is known as an operational plan.

It was initially sourced from a Snowy Hydro staff member concerned with the disregard shown for communities downstream.

Snowy Hydro has since rejected the veracity of the document however, explaining that it was just a “forecast model”, which was changed so that the floods downstream could be mitigated for.

The company has refused however, to provide the actual operational plan for December 8, citing “commercial in confidence”.

Snowy Hydro’s role in the floods was last week called into question by a number of media outlets and on December 15, metropolitan newspapers reported Snowy Hydro CEO Terry Charlton’s claims that the authority had not released any water on December 8.

“What we did last week, because we anticipated the floods, is we stopped releasing anything on Wednesday,” Mr Charlton said.

“So we took as much as possible into storage to mitigate the floods.

“But by Thursday and Friday we didn’t have the capacity to store it because we were chockers.”
A spokesman for Snowy Hydro has this week maintained Mr Charlton’s defence.
“We’ve already commented on these assertions and we have nothing further to add to what was in the Sydney press last week,” the spokesman said.

Tumut mayor Trina Thomson lives near the river and very nearly had to evacuate her home during the peak of the floods. She has called for Snowy Hydro to make available any data that could paint a clearer picture as to why the floods got to the level they did.

“I’d appreciate some transparency considering we have a number of landholders impacted on by the recent flood,” Cr Thomson said. “I think there are some grey areas that have to be clarified.”

Member for Murrumbidgee Adrian Piccoli, Wagga MP Daryl Maguire and NSW Opposition spokeswoman for water Katrina Hodgkinson were also strong in their views that Snowy Hydro should release all relevant data, but the office of the NSW Water Minister, Phillip Costa, refused to buy into the debate, saying only that they “would not comment on hypotheticals”.

Instead they brushed the issue aside to be dealt with by the NSW Office of Water, which sent a generic statement.  “Snowy Hydro operates within the conditions of its operating licence
and the NSW Office of Water ensures compliance,” the statement said.

“In response to a recent five-year licence review, both Snowy Hydro and the NSW Office of Water have increased the amount of information on operations available on their websites.”

Update: This article is now available on the website of The Daily Advertiser: http://www.dailyadvertiser.com.au/news/local/news/general/snowy-hydro-under-fire-over-water-release/2032134.aspx 

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Ben Glover from The Daily Advertiser in Wagga Wagga is the only person to have asked me directly for a copy of the Operational Plan.   Staff at both The Australian and the Australian Financial Review are aware of the story, aware of the leaked document, but so far have not followed-up or indicated that if I sent them a copy of the Operational Plan they may be too busy to follow-up or are about to go on Christmas holidays and couldn’t study it until January 5.   Prolific commentator at this blog, Polyaulax, has not  followed-up by asking for a copy of the document by phone or email.

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.”

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.

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