Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Water

Stealing Water from the Macquarie Marshes: A Note and More Pictures from Chris Hogendyk

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During the past month there has been a tributary flood event in the Macquarie Valley resulting in a moderate but valuable volume of water (approximately 26,000 megalitres) making its way down to the drought ravaged Macquarie Marshes.

Over 30% of this water was delivered away from the publicly owned Nature Reserves into the Gum Cowal/Terrigal system than runs down the eastern side of the Macquarie Marshes. This system has been receiving almost annual flooding throughout the drought. All this system is on privately owned country and as can be seen from the following images, the water is simply being diverted out onto the flood plain to grow fodder for cattle.

The following images show only two examples of the many diversions that are occurring.

mac marshes blog 1.jpg

mac marshes blog 2.jpg

Sadly, while this is happening, the two Nature Reserves originally selected for their key ecological values and owned by the people of NSW, lie starved for water and are in a significantly worse state having missed out on much of the so called environmental flows that have been despatched to the Marshes over a considerable period. Mr Hogendyk, Chair of Macquarie River Food and Fibre (MRFF) says this situation is absurd. “We are losing these iconic wetlands yet everyone involved is closing their eyes to the real cause of the problems.

Government and NGOs are simply focused on attacking the irrigation industry and buying more water entitlements while continuing to deliver water without understanding how it is being managed and diverted in the Marshes. ”

Mr Whittaker, executive member of MRFF adds “even when water does get directed to the Nature Reserves, both have large embankments upstream of them robbing them of much of their water. Has anyone assessed the impact of these banks?”

“Furthermore, of the water that does get into the Northern Nature Reserve, much of the water passes down the Bora channel system to the west rather than down the Macquarie River system. This deprives the core reed beds of much of their water” he said. The Bora channel prior to 1980 used to carry only 30% of the Macquarie River flows, now it carries 70%.

It is time all parties involved with the Marshes sat down and worked out an effective protocol for the long term by understanding the real issues and taking ownership of what are questionable practices and diversions. It is no longer acceptable for government, NGOs and some scientists to make judgements from afar that bear no resemblance to what is really the underlying problem.

from Chris Hogendyk
Chair of Macquarie River Food and Fibre

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I have written about the marshes here for OLO: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4377
And there are more blog posts here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/faq.php?id=14&category=17

ABC Belatedly Reports Macquarie Marsh Water Theft

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ABC Online and ABC Radio National this morning suggested that “The New South Wales Government is under pressure to take action against landholders who have been accused of stealing water from the Macquarie Marshes in the state’s north-west…

“A report conducted by the inland rivers network reveals some farmers have diverted [environmental flow] water for private use.

“Aerial photographs taken by the New South Wales Department of Environment and Conservation show water released as part of the environmental flow was diverted.” [to keep reading click here]

Macquarie River irrigators, in particular Chris Hogendyk, have been trying to get the ABC to report his issue for some time/years. Now it has been repackaged including by some of the culprits and/or deniers – at least that was the impression I got when I heard the story and interviews on radio national this morning – Sarah Clarke gives it a run.

Some of my many blog posts on the issue with pictures of the levies can be found here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/faq.php?id=14&category=17

A piece written for On Line Opinion can be found here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4377

I am keen to get a transcript of the comment from the various graziers and scientist as broadcast on radio national this morning. Can anyone help?

The Cost of Supplying Melbourne With Irrigation Water: A Note from Rojo

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Hi Jennifer,

I’ve just read an article in The Australian regarding a possible sweetner for the Bracks government, namely consideration of a $1.5 billion pipeline to supply Melbourne with water from the Murray river system.

I haven’t found what the other options — desalination, reuse of stormwater and a scheme to use waste water to replace water used by power generators in the Latrobe Valley — were going to cost the Victorian goverment but I’m blown away with spending $1.5 billion for 150 gigalitres per year. And the water will have to be sourced from consumptive users and almost certainly not from environmental flows.

Maybe the $1.5 billion price tag includes the cost of purchasing this water, if not it will add another $ 2-300 million.

To my way of thinking that leaves the capital cost in the region of $10-12 million per gigalitre, or $10-12,000 per megalitre. The opportunity cost of that money will hover close to $1,000 per megalitre let alone any pumping, cleaning, maintenance and payback for the $1.5 billion outlay. And if we account for the lost agricultural production(say $250 per megalitre) due to the loss of the water, then cost per megalitre approaches $2,000.

And to top it all off we’re not harnessing any new water for that outlay.

I can’t begin to guess what it would cost to harvest storm water, which is wasted at a cost to the environment, or getting waste water to power generation sites, at least doing either ‘create’ new water. Water that can be used without infringing on anyone. I’ll assume this is an expensive option.

I do note the Victorian government hasn’t mentioned recycling.

What I do have, is some understanding of desalination. One of the more recent installations is in Ashkelon, Israel. This plant has a capital cost of about $300million( US$250m) to produce 110 gigalitres per year at a cost of $700 per megalitre (52 cents US/m3)

Desalination of seawater takes 3-4kw of electricity to produce a m3 (1,000 litres).

This desalination plant has it’s own gas fired 80MW power station. I would guess such power consumption will have some people jumping up and down, but to put 80 MW into perspective it is less than 1% of Victoria’s generating capacity of 9,000 MW and is close to 10% of Victoria’s current (no pun intended) renewable electricity output of 767 MW of which 580 MW are hydro generated.

All we need to do is expand renewables by 10% to keep blood pressures in check.

A Texas site on desalination supports the Israel experience. Though slightly more expensive – those Israeli’s know how to drive a bargain.

Regards,
Rojo

Government Should Stop Blaming The Drought?

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Ken Smith, Coordinator-General and Director-General,
Department of Infrastructure, Queensland Government.

A recent publication circulated by your Department, Water for the Future, argued that Queensland is experiencing the worst drought in more than 100 years. It included the following diagram to make this point, and at face value this implies that unforeseeable drought is the major cause of southeast Queensland’s water supply crisis.

SEQ small_Water Inflow.jpg

However, others observers have offered different explanations, some of which which I have outlined in Structural Incompetence and SE Queensland’s Water Crisis.

In particular, it has been suggested that SE Queensland’s catchments (Wivenhoe in particular) are subject to very infrequent but large water inflows, with low inflows at other times sometimes for long periods. This hypothesis implies that:

The current series of years with low inflows would not be unique and should have been anticipated. If so, institutional incompetence is part of the cause of SE Queensland’s current crisis; and the diagram your Department presented might give a false impression of the situation, as it shows high past inflows averaged over long periods that potentially conceal this problem (ie infrequent large inflows and many years of low inflows).

I would appreciate clarification of the facts of the matter, as this has serious implications for public confidence in the institutions that have been responsible for water supply management in Queensland.

Regards,
John Craig
Centre for Policy and Development Systems

Remove the Barrages for the Coorong: A Note from Rojo

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Hello Jennifer,

I have been a reader and minor contributor at your blog over the last few months.

A few weeks ago I was discussing the Coorong with another commentator in relation to the Prime Minister’s new $10 billion National Water Security Plan in particular the hyper-salinity aspect.

With all the talk of the Murray “dying” I had thought the hyper-salinity was due to lower flow from the Murray River, the direct implication being less dilution of the Coorong as well as not being able to keep the mouth open.

murray mouth.JPG

As an irrigation farmer it is not pleasant to be accused of being partially responsible for destroying the Coorong.

Having been across the barrages and seeing the Coorong first hand late last year, meeting affected stakeholders and talking to South Australian government officials, I couldn’t help but feel it is the right thing to send the Coorong more water and thus that I should support the $10billion plan in its aim to buy back water for the river.

However, if my interpretation of this report ‘A Paleaecological Assessment of Water Quality Changes in the Coorong, South Australia’ is correct, the actual water from the Murray River has had no noticeable influence on the Coorong.

In fact, according to the report:

“Before European settlement the northern lagoon of the Coorong was dominated by tidal input of marine water. Marine flushing also strongly influenced the southern lagoon but less
frequently or to a lesser extent.

At no time in the 300 years before European settlement has the Coorong been noticeably influenced by flows from the River Murray.

The northern end of the southern lagoon occasionally experienced hypersaline conditions in the 300 years before European settlement. Elsewhere in the Coorong, the salinity was typically at, or below, 35,000 mg/L. In the southern lagoon the presence of diatom and ostracod taxa preferring salinity levels ~ 5000 mg/L suggests regular freshwater input. This source is likely to have been from the south-east.” [end of quote]

The report also states that “the extended presence of marine diatom taxa in Lake Alexandrina suggests the tidal prism regularly extended into Lake Alexandrina throughout the last 6000 years”, which I take to mean long periods of low flow where the mouth evidently did not close but rather was flushed by the sea.

What few people now realize is that there are barrages, construction completed in 1940, across each of the five channels connecting the lakes with the Coorong. These barrages restrict tidal flow into the lakes and stop freshwater flowing out of the Murray River’s mouth.

So effectively we might spend billions taking water from upstream irrigators and in the process displace jobs/communities and achieve nothing for the Coorong.

I do realise there are other “iconic” sites on the Murray that will benefit from more water, but they benefit already from the environmental nature of water deliveries prior to extraction, and don’t require 1000GL of fresh water evaporation from the lakes in low availability scenarios.

I now wonder if the most natural thing we can do for the Coorong is to remove the barrages and allow tidal action to do it’s business in particular flushing the Coorong. If this study by Adelaide University is correct the fresh water from the Murray River is not what the Coorong needs. It needs to be flushed by the ocean and this would be facilitated by the removal of the barrages.

Using stored fresh water from upstream to keep the mouth of the Murray River open, as currently advocated by various environment groups and the federal government shouldn’t really be an option.

There is currently a proposal to build a weir on the river at Wellington which is upstream of the lakes.

Irrigators currently dependent on the Lakes would have to be supplied from water upstream of this proposed new weir, much to their benefit by getting better quality water. Funding under the new $10 billion water plan could allow this to happen.

If we don’t get significant inflows the weir at Wellington will be built, the lake levels will fall and the irrigators won’t be irrigating anyway. But the situation at the Coorong will not improve unless the barrages are removed or opened.

If we do get substantial inflows, what was the problem again?

Cheers
Rojo

WWF Report on World’s Worst Rivers: Wrong Way Round on the Murray-Darling

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The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has just released a report entitled ‘World’s Top 10 River’s at Risk’.

Australia’s Murray-Darling is included in the top 10. But it’s two rivers, so maybe the title should be ‘World’s Top 11 River’s at Risk’?

The report goes onto state that, “The Murray and Darling Rivers have great variability in year to year flows, and their ecology is driven by large floods covering their extensive flood plains and intervening dry periods.”

This may be the case for stretches of the Darling River, but the Murray is now a completely regulated system which, has even during this worst drought, been mostly full of water.

Anyway, this new report which has generated much publicity for WWF has identified the “key threat” to the Murray-Darling as “invasive species, especially from aquarium trade”.

But, interestingly, key invasive fish species identified in the report were not introduced recently or from the aquarium trade.

According to the new WWF report, native fish species such as the Silver Perch, Freshwater Catfish and the large Murray Cod are all “in rapid decline” while numbers of invasive species have significantly increased.

The report cites a government report, Barrett 2004, and a World Resource Institute website, WRI 2003, to support the contention that numbers of native fish are in decline and another government report, but also on the native fish strategy, MDBC 2005, as evidence numbers of invasive species are on the increase.

But none of these reports included good credible data on changes in numbers of invasive or native fish species.

The government’s native fish strategy was written by ecologist Jim Barrett. I contacted Mr Barrett when I was writing ‘Myth & the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’ back in 2003.

Based in part on information provided by Mr Barrett, I wrote in that report that, “Since the 1980s, carp numbers [a key invasive species in the Murray River] have been observed to decline and downstream of Yarrawonga, numbers are thought to be about half what they were in 1997 and are now estimated to represent 21 per cent of total fish numbers. According to the Murray Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) a likely explanation for the decline in carp numbers is that the initial population boom resulted in an overutilization of available resources and subsequent reduction to equilibrium carrying capacity for this species. In contrast, local fishermen attribute the observed reduction in carp numbers to predation from an increasing Murray cod population.”

The WWF report acknowledges that, “since 1996 A$2 billion has been allocated to recover water to increase environmental flows and restore fish passage for the lower 1,800 km of Murray River.”

But in the next paragraph, without providing any data, falsely concludes that “despite these worthy initiatives, the ecological health of the rivers continues to decline.”

But even the typically pessimistic head of the Murray Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) Dr Wendy Craik recently described the “visionary Native Fish Strategy” as a success with “solid evidence” that native fish are using the new innovative fishways built as a part of the sea to Hume Dam fish passage program. Furthermore, Dr Craik claimed another success in the “resnagging” project in which large tree stumps, or snags, are placed strategically into rivers. The snags provide refuge from fast-flowing water and help to recreate original river habitats for native fish.”

But when is the MDBC, or WWF, or someone else, going to start collecting some good credible data on fish numbers?

In summary, the WWF report ‘World’s Top 10 River’s at Risk’ which is making news today, is about 20 years out of date at least with respect to the Murray River. Indeed while numbers of native fish have on average, probably declined since European settlement, with a crash in Murray Cod populations in the early 1960s, there is evidence to suggest numbers of native fish, including the Murray Cod, are now on the increase while invasive species are on the decline. So the WWF has got it all the wrong way around. Then again, they are perhaps more interested in ‘hand-waving’ than river ecology.