Hurry Save The Murray!

The pumps on the Clayton dam/regulator are still taking water from Lake Alexandrina and filling up the Goolwa Lake.  Water is backing up the Finniss River and Currency Creek and wetlands are filling. More rain is coming.

When will the pumps stop? How will the decision be made? The SA Govt has permission to pump to 0.7m AHD. They have access to 27.5GL of 50 GL of environmental flows which are yet to be delivered.

If you visit the DWLBC website http://data.rivermurray.sa.gov.au/  you can see that the water levels at sites within the Goolwa Lake and if you click on the “Site ID” you can access more details. Here are the highlights for today, November 2, 2009:

* Beacon 60 at West Clayton today at  9.00pm, the level was 0.765m AHD

* Lower Finniss at 6.00am was 0.683m AHD

* Downstream of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge at 9.00pm, 0.654 m AHD.

* Data on water levels for Currency Creek are missing. If you pursue the details within the “Time Series Data” on the drop down menu under the “Site ID”, you’ll note that water levels have also been removed from that data set. The only way to access the probable levels is through the archived data which show the level is near 0.8m AHD.

Richard Brown, the DWLBC Project Manager for the Regulators, told Diane Bell that the decision to stop pumping will be made by averaging the readings at the Beacon 60 West Clayton site and the Hindmarsh Island Bridge site and when the average has been above 0.7m for 5 days, the pumps will be switched off.

Perhaps we will have a silent night by the end of this week.

And the Currency Creek data? Yes, they were removed from the site but Richard Brown assured Diane Bell that there is no conspiracy. The readings were wrong and the monitoring equipment is being checked. Nothing rides on the Currency Creek data is terms of decision-making he stated.

At this point it is helpful to recall that the design of the Currency Creek dam/regulator was changed. In the original plans the height was to be at sea level but the dam walls were raised and only a relatively short spillway way remained at 0.0m AHD.  It is also helpful to recall that the Currency Creek regulator was supposed to catch the first flush of acidified water as it was mobilised by the winter rains, pool the water so that it could bioremediate and did not overwhelm the Goolwa Channel with acid. However, the Finniss River flowed with such a mighty force that the water which was trying to get through to Lake Alexandrina, but was prevented from doing so by the dam/regulator at Clayton, flowed back up the Currency Creek and thus water was flowing upstream over the regulator. The http://data.rivermurray.sa.gov.au/   website also contains data on pH levels and all are alkaline. Now why did we need that regulator?