Jennifer Marohasy

LAST December Snowy Hydro dumped water into the already flooded Murray-Darling, but said it had little choice.   A report just released by the NSW Office of Water clears Snowy Hydro but only in so much as it states that Snowy Hydro operated in accordance with its licence conditions. At issue has always been whether these licence [...]

 It is the ultimate in hypocrisy for the Commonwealth government to be insisting farmers give back water under a new planning scheme to save the environment, while continuing to pocket millions from water wasted by Snowy Hydro for derivative trading on the electricity market.  LAST night on ABC Television’s 7.30 Report, journalist Bronwyn Herbert explained how [...]

Before the recent flooding, there was much lamenting about how there is never enough water in the Murray Darling Basin for both irrigated agriculture and also the environment.   Yet in all this discussion no consideration has been given to the more integrated management of Snowy Hydro waters with management of water allocations within the Basin [...]

“THE 75 year Snowy Water Licence (issued in 2002) provides flexibility to Snowy Hydro to store and release the Scheme’s water resource for electricity production and derivative trading and sub-optimises the use of the water for irrigation, communities and the environment. “It also falls short of providing optimum regulation of the combined Snowy Scheme, Murray and [...]

OVER the last few weeks I have posted information suggesting that Snowy Hydro has not managed the vast waters under its control appropriately and in particular that it has failed to store flood waters for subsequence seasons and even exacerbated flooding in the Riverina by making water releases from Lake Eucumbene – the system’s central [...]

OVER the last few weeks I have posted information suggesting that Snowy Hydro has not managed the vast waters under its control appropriately and in particular that it has failed to store flood waters for subsequence seasons and even exacerbated flooding in the Riverina by making water releases from Lake Eucumbene – the system’s central reservoir.  [...]

THE managing director of Snowy Hydro, Terry Charlton, denies that Snowy Hydro contributed to the devastating flooding along the Murrumbidgee in early December in which homes were destroyed and wheat fields drown.  He does, however, admit that until Wednesday, December 8, water was being released from Lake Eucumbene.   Lake Eucumbene has the capacity to store [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]