Murrumbidgee Valley Food and Fibre Association (MVFFA) is appalled to learn that Snowy Hydro has been releasing water ostensibly as part of its environmental flow obligations that can only have exacerbated the current flood crisis.
This bureaucratic incompetence was uncovered by Dr Jennifer Marohasy and detailed in her article published by Quadrant on Saturday.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/12/bureaucratic-flood-damage
After ringing up to ask a genuine question, she was given the most amazing “run around” by the water bureaucracies.
MVFFA can confirm that similar questions have been asked by several of its members and they have also been stonewalled.
“We all knew that something was not right up there in the mountains but we couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone”, said Mrs. Christine O’Callaghan, Public Officer for MVFFA.
“I have been trying to ring the two separate departments for over a week and could only get to those nice women who answer the phones. I have left messages for both David Harris (Snowy Hydro Limited) and David Harriss (NSW Office of Water).
“I was asking the same questions that Dr Marohasy was asking.”
“It is very fortunate for all of us that Dr Marohasy recognized that something was odd about the answers she was given and that she was tenacious enough and concerned enough to get to the bottom of it” said Mrs Debbie Buller, President. “At least we now have some answers.”
“MVFFA calls for an immediate cessation of all environment flows into all catchments downstream from the Snowy Hydro System.
“They are sending out water into dams that can’t store it, into river systems which are in major flood, through environmental assets which are already flooded.”
“There is not one ounce of common sense or sensible water management here”, said Mrs Robyn Schmetzer, Treasurer.
“Why on earth aren’t they diverting every single drop possible into Lake Eucumbene to help alleviate the flood crisis?
“Eucumbene is the central reservoir in the Snowy system and is only 25% full, leaving a huge storage potential.
“The Snowy system was built to not only generate power but also as a storage system to help manage the excesses of our variable climate.”
Media enquiries to Debbie Buller on 0414374312
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jen/Deb,
No press releases supporting you from the Irrigators Council
http://www.nswic.org.au/news_pressreleases.shtml
or the voice of Aussie farmers
http://www.nff.org.au/media-releases.html
No support either from the Minister
http://www.tonyburke.com.au/file.php?file=/media.html
[his webpage needs up dating since the football match]
No media releases from NSW government either or even the NSW Office of Water.
My guess is that all the “men in suits” knew all along.
Sorry.
Dennis,
They most definitely did. I will even concede that some of them were trying to do something about it.
Jennifer’s article will definitely force some of “the men in suits”…in particular the bureaucrats… to scramble around today and try and figure out how to explain this away. It will be enormously interesting to hear what they come up with.
I wonder if it will have anything thing to do with section 3 of section 4 and levels of which of 16 dams and extra amendments to legislation during exceptional circumstances because the water sharing plan was suspended and that people don’t know which David Harris is which and that no one ever thought it would ever rain again because their computer models said so and that the MDBA had also caused some extra problems and I have run out of breath!!!! There will be a lot of very interesting excuses. It doesn’t change the fact that due to some crazy anomoly in the operating licence….every day….for weeks…..SHL have been putting an extra 4,000 to 5,000ML of water on top of a major flood.
As far as I can figure out…it doesn’t really matter what excuse they come up with…..this does not make one ounce of sense!
Dam management blamed for the Tumut River flood
Posted 4 hours 43 minutes ago
A Tumut Plains landowner wants the major storage dams to be kept purposely low in wet years, to avoid flooding downstream.
Stewart Smith said at the height of the floods along the Tumut River last week, he couldn’t ascertain from either Snowy Hydro or State Water, information about releases from the Blowering Dam.
Tumut River residents immediately downstream of the dam were issued with urgent evacuation orders on Thursday after the increase in outflows.
Mr Smith has questioned Snowy Hydro’s motives, after water from the scheme was pumped into an already overflowing Blowering Dam last week.
Snowy Hydro said it was forced to increase inflows into Blowering because the Jounama Pondage was full after the heavy rain.
Mr Smith said he can’t understand how that could happen.
“I was talking to mate this morning and he said Lake Eucumbene is only 30 per cent full,” he said.
“And yet they are still channeling a lot of water back this way instead of sending it the other way and it’s supposedly because they make more money going through with the power,” said Mr Smith.
Mr Smith said he called both State Water and Snowy Hydro to try and find out how much water was overflowing from Blowering Dam.
He said both organisations blamed each other for the miscommunication.
Mr Smith said he still can’t get a confirmation about further outflows from the dam.
“No, and no one can tell me, I’m not used to this.”
“We come from more hill country and we’ve still got some hill country, but no, quite suprised that really we are not getting more help and more constructive information.”
Mr Smith says local residents are questioning how Blowering Dam can be overflowing while Lake Eucembene in the high country is only around a third full.
“I just really can’t understand why they don’t keep Blowering at 85 to 90 per cent, especially in a year like this when so much rain was forecast.”
“We haven’t got a major problem, but we’ve got a fair but of water on the flats,” said Mr Smith.
The SES says the Tumut River has been at around 2.1 metres for several days as a result of the Blowering dam overflow.
The SES has advised Tumut Plains landowners that the minor flooding of the rural floodplain caused by these river conditions will persist for a protracted period until overflow from the dam diminishes.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/13/3091551.htm
Oh for goodness sake! The plot sickens! ….thickens?….Nope! Definitely sickens!
This is staritng to make me feel sick….those poor people… they’re flooding and no one will give them a straight answer.
Something is definitely out of kilter here.
So far, the only logical explanation is yours Jen.
There is blog comment at Andrew Bolts that I don’t know what I am talking about; that Lake Eucumbene is not part of the Murray Darling Basin
[ http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/no_abuse_hides_the_fact_the_warmist_models_cannot_even_predict_our_past/#commentsmore ]
Of course the Snowy Hydro scheme was about linking east and west of the Great Dividing Range to create water storages both sides and be able to pass water both ways.
I’ve left the following reply which appears to be still “awaiting moderation”:
Hi Hamish,
Yes, we have flooding everywhere. Hopefully it won’t end up as bad as 1956.
We now have more storage potential, to prevent this, but our water managers don’t appear to be doing the right thing.
Someone has commented that I don’t know what I am talking about re. Snowy Hydro sending water to Lake Eucumbene and that I should provide more details following my article at Quadrant Online.
Snowy Hydro needs to explain why it is not diverting water away from Blowering Dam and to Lake Eucumbene. The Lake is central to the entire Snowy Scheme. Water can be diverted from the Upper Murrumbidgee to this Lake.
Instead Snowy Hydro are continuing to send flood waters west.
You can get another perspective reinforcing my point from this story at [url=http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/13/3091551.htm]ABC Online[/url].”
I think you might want to check the public information.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2010/12/13/open-thread-december-13-17/comment-page-1/#comment-41302
David Harriss is the NSW Water Commissioner, not the boss of snowy hydro. Here’s the snowy hydro org chart:
http://www.snowyhydro.com.au/files/SHL_org_chart.pdf
Here’s the table of environmental flows, from snowy hydro’s web site:
http://www.snowyhydro.com.au/files/CalendarSnowyRiverReleaseTargetsOct2010.pdf
About 80-100Ml per day. Nothing like 4000+.
Litigation should ensue; but it won’t so accountability will mingle with the sediment.
Nothing has maddened or politicised me more than the dismantling of our agricultural power, particularly with regard to the Murray-Darling Basin. I drives me wild to think of the deliberate degradation of an engineering and farming triumph like the Riverina. The belief that environmentalist boffins can manage such country better than farmers is the kind of belief most people can only hold before the age of twenty. Then real-life sets in.
Just when I thought the folly had reached a peak, I stumbled on your website today. It still seems inconceivable that this could be happening, but, if what you report can be finally confirmed, now is the time to bombard-protest by blog, email or whatever else. A green senate is not far off.
Anyway, Jennifer, thanks for your persistence in tracking down the facts so far. No doubt you’ll have to face ridicule, and the accusation that you’re in the pay of Big Something. How come skeptics can’t fund a huge gig in Cancun? Big Something doesn’t seem to pay much.
Keep it up girls you are doing a great job, but we have a long way to go.
Cohers, you are probably right regarding the Bureaucrats, but I believe there will be a few Political careers in tatters following the Water Act debacle.
Pikey.
Why didn’t the Bolter run with this story? We have been tipping him for days and he sits on his hands.
I think you should take more time to look into this,and making accusations like ‘sending floods west’ is not helpful. You are not looking at where all the water came from,and when and how much.
The reason why you haven’t got the answers you want is probably because the information will take a while to distill.
From information I can gather,you seem to be overestimating Snowy Hydro’s ability to mitigate a flood of this magnitude,after a very wet November, with the infrastructure they have. You seem to be overestimating the actual contribution of the alleged 4 to 5000 ML/day- is this in anyway confirmed?- to various flood peaks,and you’ve missed a lot of information.
Firstly, looking at BOMs monthly rainfall figures for the Snowy Mountains,the divide and western catchments are saturated from a very wet November. Dams were full by the end of the month,and the Tumut was running a banker. No headroom.
The rainfall map for December to date shows more enormous falls. But look… the wettest area of the last fortnight is_ largely_ outside_ the_ Snowy_ Scheme_ catchment. The wettest areas were the very top of the Murrumbidgee,the Goobarragandra River,Goodradigbee River,the ACT catchments and east to the Queanbeyan River. The last three catchments,combined with strong inflows from the Cooma region,the Molonglo and Yass rivers, Jugiong Creek, and Muttama Creek,provided the bulk of the flood at Gundagai…not the Tumut River.
The flood peaked at Gundagai on the 4th,with the great bulk of its volume derived from the Murrumbidgee above the Tumut Junction. The Tumut had put a flood peak of around 26000 ML/day into the Murrumbidgee on about 1/12/10,and then subsided to half that volume by the 4th,not peaking again until 9/12 at Brungle. But the Murrumbidgee was pushing a peak past the Tumut junction on about 3/12 of about 240,000ML/day…dwarfing the Tumut’s contribution,which would have contained the alleged Snowy transfer….Most of the flood came from outside Snowy Hydro’s regulatory system. The flood peaked at 280,000 ML/day at Gundagai,making this supposed contribution from the bureaucrats…and we don’t know how much went into the Murray side of the equation…pretty insignificant. One percent?
Further to the point,any water falling below Tumut Pond dam,into the already brimful lower Tumut River dams was essentially unregulatable. The whole Bago Plateau, the Yarrangobilly River,Jounama Creek,all the catchments of the Bogong Mountains,the Goobarragandra River Gilmore Creek,,Adjungbilly Creek…all free flowing,either straight into the spilling dams,or into the Tumut directly. In a wet period which saw 24 hour rainfall records broken.
Looking at the release timings at the Office of Water site,it seems that State Water tried what they could to ease overflow from Blowering Dam to control flooding on the Tumut floodplain.
Now looking at SH’s lake levels calculator,it’s obvious that Tantangara Dam has been a great help in minimising the contribution of the upper Murrumbidgee to flooding downstream of Cooma. Its level jumped 10% in the last week. The tunnel from that dam to Eucumbene is of limited volume,so transfers to the bigger lake are modest. Whatever,Tantangara has plenty of capacity to soak up more anomalous rain,but since its catchment is small let’s not overestimate what it can do. But it intercepted a considerable volume of water that would have contributed to flooding.
Eucumbene has hovered around 27-28%. Its own catchment is small,particularly in relation to its potential capacity,so level changes will be small compared with volumes entering. It’s hard to say what was going on…releasing water downstream to Jindabyne doesn’t really make sense…looks like BAU for generation, more water can enter from Tantangara at leisure
Lake Jindabyne has risen strongly suggesting that it is mitigating. After all the tunnel and generator system only has so much capacity.
And that’s the real question. Given the maximum flow capacity of the Tumut-Eucumbene tunnel,how much water could be pushed into Eucumbene from the very head of the Tumut River to mitigate a flood,which derived most of its volume from points downstream? The contribution from Tooma Dam is modest..I don’t know for sure,but I suspect this dam spilled down its usual path to the Murray.it can send a maximum of 3000ML/day to the link tunnel,which itself can supposedly carry 10,000ML/day if my info is correct. What happens to power generation and SH’s revenue?
Should SH have stopped Snowy transfer altogether and just used flood contributions from within the generating catchments to generate power. Could they? Did they? Even if they did,it would not have made much difference to the Murrumbidgee flood given the sources of the water.The whole,and I mean whole,upper Murrumbidgee catchment was saturated,then in flood.Only the Snowy Hydro’s bit-Tantangara Dam- held water back.
Commendable research Poly; so you’re saying SH’s apparent maintainence of flow did not affect flooding anywhere and that there was no capacity within the system to store that flood water?
If that is so then there has been a remarkable misreading of climate cycles and rainfall patterns; and this is the great danger from AGW, apart from the obscene amount of wasted money; if decisions are made which affect infrastructure and economic investment, and those decisions are based on AGW theory, in my opinion a failed theory, then Australia’s bum is going to be bitten severely in the future.
Right now we are entering a negative PDO phase:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/great-global-warming-blunder-pdo-2000-2008-5monavg.jpg
During this phase rainfall will increase despite reckless predictions by such AGW luminaries as Flannery and as contained in recent BoM and CSIRO reports; if decisions are made on the basis of a dryer future there will be a catastrophe, but not a natural one.
Thanks,cohey…I do ramble on a bit there. But yes,the bulk of the flood came from outside SH’s catchments,and Burrinjuck was so full it could do little to spread the load. I can’t say the so-far hypothetical EFs didn’t extend the duration of Tumut Valley inundation,by keeping the river nearer bankfull than it might have been,but the Tumut’s contribution to the Murrumbidgee peaks was not huge,and it was not synchronous. I’m itching to know what the story will be from the water people.
Spring was super wet through out the south-western slopes and onto the tablelands.Burrinjuck Dam had its wettest week on record (since 1908) around the turn of November-December.
You’re right that,while the La Nina was expected to moisten up a lot of Aus,the magnitude and spread of the rainfall wasn’t anticipated…but it is record-breaking or near so in places..and its only mid- December! Maybe they should gate Blowering and gain a bit more breathing space?
Again speculating,maybe State Water could have tried to keep Blowering lower ,but this would have made local inundation downstream even more frequent. Again,all spring months were well above average,particularly in the lower unregulated half of the Tumut catchment. The Tumut has probably been bankfull for more of spring than not.
Who knows whether we will resume more typical patterns after this summer? It may be back to the drier recent pattern for the SE,only alleviated by the odd La Nina/IOD phase conjunction.The tendencies behind the drying are more associated with more frequent influences from the south and west;northern tropical stuff will always turn up now and then…or we could have a cluster of Nina like 73-76,then revert.
Hey guys!
It doesn’t really matter whether the amount was significant or not. The whole point is that they did absolutely nothing to help.
And that they “ducked” Jennifer’s questions.
No one has argured that SH and NOW caused the floods. Everyone knows that only Mother Nature can do that.
Burrunjuck is not part of this equation….no water from Snowy Hydro has been put in Burrunjuck.
The important thing to remember is 4,000 to 5,000ML has been sent into Blowering and Hume dams every day for weeks! Those dams have been out of control for weeks. It was possible to store at least this amount of water in Eucumbene.
Water runs downhill. Where on earth do they think it’s going?
Please go to the SH website and look at the dropping levels in Eucumbene in the middle of the best inflows in years. There is definitely not a special black hole up there that has not allowed Eucumbene to fill. The levels have actually dropped quite significantly. How is that possible unless SHL has been releasing water?
Debbie,I think it does matter if the amount is significant or not,and I think that someone should be able to work that out to some level of confidence before we ‘go off’. There has been accusatory stuff without decent justification so far.
Burrinjuck,and the uncontrollable contribution of the upper Murrumbidgee catchment, is absolutely part of the equation if you are asking what effect on flood peak and duration the alleged 4/5000 ML/day had downstream of the Tumut junction. And its not entirely irrelevant to flooding along the Tumut,as the greater volume from the bigger Murrumbidgee flood retards the exit of the Tumut water.
But yes,the main effect from keeping stream levels higher with these releases would be along the Tumut.Somebody should be able to calculate a real figure.
I’ll repeat that Tantangara Dam was definitely mitigating flooding in the upper reaches of the Murrumbidgee.
And I’ll repeat we don’t even know whether our supposed EF quantity is accurate yet. Maybe water was shunted to the least swollen system? Love to know.