Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Still Water in the Murray River

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Last week I drove from Brisbane (south eastern Queensland) to Barham on the Murray River.

Listening to the news in Brisbane I was getting the impression the Murray River was nearly empty of water.

In fact there is still a lot of water in the river but the Hume and Dartmouth dams are very low. Also, some of the tributories of the river are being shut-off with cod dying in the ‘shrinking’ billabongs. And many river red gums on the flood plains are looking very stressed from the drought.

Barham_boat n text Nov3_07.jpg

But as this picture shows, the river itself is still magnificent and the red gums along the river beautiful.

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Comments

  1. Luke says

    Strangely that’s the effect dams and weirs seem to have. How are the irrigators and orchardists faring?

  2. Jennifer says

    Luke,
    It depends whether they have a high or general security water licence, live in SA, Victoria of NSW.
    By the way I noticed a while ago you were suggesting salinity in the lower lakes was out of control … I’ve had a look at the data and it is not so bad. I’ll get the graph up as a new post sooner or later.

  3. Luke says

    I posted a report that salinity levels were rising due to the low flows and this was of some concern by the authors. It wasn’t my personal measurements. Simply the point being that catchment hydrological conditions can influence salinity levels. There are short term, long term, natural and anthropogenic components. Science has a job to work out the relative contributions and trends.

    The point is that some irrigators and orchardists are doing it very tough – are they not? So would consider many are or only a few?

  4. Robert says

    Hopefully this will all be ‘water under the bridge’ after very good rain fell in NSW and Victoria over the weekend.

  5. SJT says

    “Strangely that’s the effect dams and weirs seem to have.”

    So it’s more of a long lake at the moment, rather than river?

  6. SJT says

    “”We had reasonable rainfall, but there’s been absolutely no run-off into the storages, because the catchments are so dry,” he said.

    “We now face a situation where the storages of the Murray-Darling are about half what they were at this time last year, and irrigators are facing an even more desperate situation as they just had no water, and we’re seeing permanent plantings now die.””

    Warming helps dry out the land, reasonable rainfall can’t get to the storages because there is no runoff.