Dahlings! I have to apologise for my long silence – I’ve been indisposed with Swine Flu. What an indignity for a Gal with Curves to endure! I won’t go into all the gory details. It was just too, too awful.
By the time I came to and was out and about again, the Goolwa Pool was nearly full. There had been another flood on the Finniss and so it filled really quickly. Rory said he felt so miserable seeing the water flowing across the ford at Winery Road, knowing it wouldn’t reach the Lakes. But, he reasoned, there was a good side – if the Goolwa Pool was filled by the Finniss, then the Forces of Evil wouldn’t need to pump so much from Lake Alexandrina.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
In their “we need to do this now because…” letter that the State Government wrote to the Hon. Peter Garrett in Canberra asking his permission to build The Wall, they proposed that pumping from Lake Alexandrina would only be used to raise the level of the Goolwa Pool to +0.3 m AHD (Rory says this means the height of an empty champagne bottle above sea level).
This would, they estimated, require the pumping of 27.5 Bigger Letters –that’s what I thought they said. Rory said it was actually 27.5 Gigalitres – 27,500 Olympic-Sized Swimming Pools – Gigs for short.
Goodness me! The mind boggles!! Imagine all those palm trees and li-los and curvaceous tanning bodies! All those Swimming Pools, just to go into the Goolwa Pool, where there are no palm trees, and in my experience, no curvaceous bodies either. Just a lot of jet skis and sail boats.
The target level for the Goolwa Pool was +0.7 AHD i.e. the height of a bar‑stool above sea level. Quite why this particular depth was selected as “essential to preserve the environment of the Goolwa Channel”, remains unclear. This is the level the whole of the Lakes used to be at once upon a time, before all this mess started. Those of us on the outside looking in can’t help but suspect that Bar-Stool Height presents a familiar, pretty view for real estate, nice deep marinas, and lots of water for the afore-mentioned jet skis and sail boats. Maybe I’m just becoming cynical, but there you are.
Anyway in the “we need to do this now because…” letter, it was stated that in order to raise the water depth from Champagne Bottle Height to Bar-Stool Height, the Goolwa Pool would have to rely on flows from the tributaries (meaning the Finniss and Currency Creek).
Well, while I had Swine Flu, the Champagne Bottle Level came and went and they still kept pumping. Three pumps the height of the construction site dunnies going all day and all night, seven days a week. A man who looked official said to Rory on the clifftop that they hadn’t pumped their 27.5 Gigs yet.
“But how”, I asked, sipping my chicken broth, followed by a G & T for medicinal purposes, “are they measuring these 27.5 Bigger Letters? How do we know when they’ve got there?” I was used to little dials that whizzed around like those at petrol stations. I’d seen the Clayton pumps. There wasn’t a dial in sight. Rory said a man in orange overalls told him that they measured the amount pumped by the amount of fuel they used.
That seemed awfully suss to me.
And besides, how do we know how much fuel they’ve used? They could keep pumping until the cows come home and still tell us they hadn’t reached their 27.5 Bigger Letters yet.
We as The Public just have to trust them. But quite frankly Dahlings, after everything that’s happened, would you?
On Sunday the 18th, I went for my first Post Swine Flu outing. Rory and I sat on the clifftop looking at the Goolwa Pool. It was just after sunset and, I have to confess, superbly beautiful. The gaunt sand bars had all gone. The orange sky was reflected in the extensive sheet of calm water. “Just like photos on calendars in the Old Days”, Rory said. The Finniss was now flowing strongly again in its second flood since they closed The Wall. The level in the Pool had reached +0.64 m. Dahlings, that’s barely the height of a G & T glass below Bar-Stool Height! And yes, they were still pumping. Pelicans flocked around the outlets in a frenzy of feeding delight. Whole fish must be being sucked through.
I was momentarily speechless. I wondered if I was having a Swine Flu Hallucination!
This was mad!! The Finniss flood alone would surely fill the Goolwa Pool up to overflowing. And no, I wasn’t seeing things – they were definitely pumping.
It got worse. “There are no siphons!”, I suddenly said to Rory, “not a peep of a siphon”. That was another thing the SA Government had promised in their “we need to do this now because…” letter to Mr Garrett – they promised siphons. The Wall was to accommodate siphons.
Now say Siphons to a Gal with Curves, and she immediately thinks of those wonderful chrome and glass 1930s appliances that put fizz in your drinks. My best Grade Two friend’s parents had one of these, and her dad would press the handle, squirting bubbly water into our raspberry cordial. So, of course, I imagined great big shiny chrome things sitting on top of The Wall and squirting bubbly water back into Lake Alexandrina. Rory said that actually siphons were just boring pipes.
In the event of tributary streams filling the Goolwa Pool to a level above Bar-Stool Height, the excess water was to be returned to Lake Alexandrina via a system of pipes, capable of transporting one Bigger Letter – the water of a thousand Olympic-Sized Swimming Pools – per day.
Interestingly, Rory mused, this is a volume greater than the threequarters of a Bigger Letter the Goolwa Channel Water Level Management Project claims is being delivered, in total, by all three pumps working non-stop for 24 hours. One therefore would expect the siphons to be quite BIG pipes. There was no sign of any pipes, anywhere, let alone big ones.
We had watched the contractors build and compact and level and finish The Wall with no sign of the promised, well in my case, giant chrome 1930s Soda Siphons! At the time we gave them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they had to let the structure “settle” first.
But now here we were, water in the Goolwa Pool brimming to within a G & T glass of Bar-Stool Height, and there was no way they could put those pipes in now, at least that’s what Rory thought. He was expecting culvert pipes through The Wall like those under roads. There were no culvert pipes, and no way of putting them in.
A Gal with Curves might be forgiven for suspecting there was never any intention of providing siphons.
A few days later Rory returned from his travels and announced that he had heard a Rumour. On the Long Weekend, just as I was coming down with Swine Flu, Goolwa was celebrating its “Goolwa Alive” festival. Not only is it “Alive” this year, it’s “Better Than Ever”. As part of being “Better Than Ever” the Lock in the Goolwa Barrages began operating again, the first time for years, allowing boats to access the Coorong.
Joy was short lived. Due to a lack of flows, sand bars had built up in the channel on the sea side. The boats couldn’t actually get very far. And according to the Rumour, the only way to remove the sand bars is the sudden release through the Barrages of a Great Big Flush. Something like flushing the loo after you haven’t flushed it for a week.
It is now the end of October and the height in the Goolwa Pool is, as we speak, +0.67 m AHD. That’s only 3 cm M’Dears – barely an ice cube below Bar‑Stool Height! The Finniss is still flowing strongly, there is no sign of siphons, and the pumps are still pumping.
What can a Gal say?
Cheers, M’Dears,
Po’
