As a hijacks happening in the flood thread here play to your hearts content so we can keep the other thread on target.

I'm no dam expert, but in general why would the government commit money to a dam when the trend in rainfall has been downward for over 10 years. This year is wet, but that doesn't gaurentee good rainfall for the next 10 years.

Brumby:

$1.7b for a dam. Medium to long term forecast is for rain and lots of it.

$5.7b for a desal plant which cannot be built at the present time since the rain is too heavy and the site is unworkable.

$1b on a north south pipeline which will be useless in 12 months.

Regards Brian

As for the cost of the Desal here will be very little change out of $10 Billion, the plant will have 5 trains/units with a total output of 200 Gigalitres.

The project may get scaled back because of outrageous cost blowouts.

The construction site Is an adulate basket case, with clueless management (many top major project managers refuse to work on the project) Internal thuggery (management trying the push workers to put a foot wrong so management can have a reason to sack them)

A South Gippsland wet winter and mud has hit them for 6

No Government will build dams and associated pipes, pumps, etc for the chance there may be a flood.

If they do build a dam they usually take a large % of the water Inflows away from the river system, to get a fair return on their Investment, but the River System suffers as a result.

A Dam on the Mitchell or Avon Rivers would have a devastating effect on the Gippsland Lakes, Floods are very very Important to the ecosystem of the Lakes, enough water Is already taken out of the system by Industry, farming and Melbourne.

Melbourne should better use the H2O they already have In their water system and not dump It at sea.

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Have a gander at this, written a while ago.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/truth- ... -ddcu.html

Greg,

The last 10 years is a result of a drought. Not a shift in climate change (Which is open to debate). 1900 saw a 10 year long drought, come, and then go. Just like now.

There is nothing a government can safely do to change the climate. Not in their term anyway. The closest thing to that, is modern technology desal. Damns wont do squat. We already boast the highest litre per citizen in water capacity. So what is building another dam going to do?

Why cant we do what China did. Run a pipe from the north to the south. Send the water that NT & QLD sends out to sea, into VIC, NSW where it's warranted. Spend the money and link the country. China did it. Why cant we?

The southern states are drier states, whereas the north is traditionally wetter. Again just like China. One pipe, No desal, and no dams. Just a massive reduction in water waste.

No idea. Im not a politician. This is just a forum.

Scrap the bloody bonuses that we end up paying back as taxes any ways.

I'd rather have major infrastructure that some yobbo have a new flat screen TV and no appreciation of material objects, due to being conditioned to handouts.

This article sums up the fiasco of Melbourne's water supply fiasco very well.

As a business manager, Victoria doesn't hold water

Alan MoranHerald Sun 4th September, 2010

Rain is falling in Victoria and water restrictions are being relaxed.

How well has the Government performed as a business manager in drought-proofing Melbourne and other Victorian cities?

The Thomson Dam - Victoria's most recent major catchment development - supplies on average 150 gigalitres a year, a third of Melbourne's needs. It was commissioned in 1983; since then Melbourne's population has increased by 30 per cent.

Soon after being voted in, the Bracks/Brumby administration abandoned previous Melbourne Water plans for ensuring supply keeps up with demand. Melbourne Water planned a sequential development of catchments in the east of the state to service the growing needs of urban centres.

Daunted by the prospect of adverse publicity from demonstrators in koala suits at a dam site, Labor pretended that climate change would mean water shortages. And it argued that Victoria couldn't afford the $1 billion cost of a new dam.

So the Government introduced usage restrictions, and built a pipe from the northern irrigation area and a desalination plant.

The pipeline from the north can deliver about half as much water as a new dam in the eastern ranges. Including spending on irrigation channels, it has cost $1.1 billion. On top of this are expenses of pumping the water over the Great Divide.

The desalination plant's costs are $5.7 billion for about 150 gigalitres a year - about the same as would be provided by duplicating the Thomson Dam either in the Thomson catchment itself or on the Mitchell.

The bottom line is that to avoid spending $1 billion ($1.35 billion in today's money), the Government embarked on programs costing $7 billion.

Moreover, pumping water through the northern pipeline and from the desalination plant, unlike water flowing naturally from the mountains, entails increased emissions of greenhouse gases which the government says it abhors. (Only an idiot could believe the claim that pumping the water entails "100 per cent offset of electricity by renewable energy").

In addition, the Government has forced Melburnians to save water. This has meant dry sports grounds and gardens, and expensive water conserving devices.

Many areas around the world have desalination plants and water recovery measures. But they, unlike Victoria, are running against capacity limits to new dam-fed supplies. Victoria has enough rainfall in its catchment areas to avoid forever the need to artificially create drinking water or to acquire it from irrigators.

In deliberately shunning the use of our abundant natural water resources, the Government is therefore sacrificing community wealth.

Even without accounting for the expenses and inconveniences of water restrictions, the Government's solutions to ensuring an adequate water supply comes at a cost premium of $6 billion. This means the Government has wasted $1000 for every person in Victoria.

Few people evaluate the Victorian Government's performance as a business manager now that most of the former state-run businesses have been privatised.

But the present Government has allowed political considerations to override commercial realities on water - one of the few businesses it actually owns.

With this experience, imagine what excess costs would be loaded on to the community if the State Government still owned electricity, gas, forest plantations and the TAB.

http://ipa.org.au/news/2197/as-a-busine ... hold-water

Desal plants are not good and you vics (as much as I don't generally like you) don't want one.

Read about the problems here in SA with ours... Built in the wrong location, wrong system, wrong energy source, wrong outlet location, cost (and time) blowouts. Typical result of our inept Government, and it should be noted that Federal Labor's minister for climate change, Murray and miscellaneous smeg is an SA senator...

Who needs water? We have the Grand Prix, a newly commenced waste of over $300 million on the Tennis Centre, Regional Farce Rail, lovely forested potential water catchments which we can log for woodchips to Japan, and room for thousands more outer suburban dwellings where people will presumably buy bottled water.Nuthin' wrong with our management.

What price will you pay for water ?

Water is one of the cheapest liquids around and moving it any great distance will cost a lot of money. Most of the water used in Australia (about 70% I believe) is used to grow food. Get water by unconventional means and you have to pay more for food. Our most productive farms get by on irrigation.

When we talk of dams being 40% full, this is a bit misleading. We should be talking of 4 years worth of water in store. Being full would mean about 10 years worth of water. This is not really needed, as reducing our consumption would give an extended life to our holdings.

I do think the N-S pipeline and the desal plant were a bit too much, too soon. There were alternatives: recycling, water conservation, and local water tanks. these can still be done.

We do not need high quality water to grow flowers or flush the toilets, so local rain water tanks are a cheap idea (although not at the current cheap price of water). Very little of our water use is about drinking, cooking, bathing, etc.

The desal plant is an expensive way of getting water and we have a take or pay contract, so we still have to pay a lot of money even if we do not use any of the water. This will be behind the move to encourage us to increase our water consumption so that desal water actually gets used.

Recycling is not a big deal either. We get some water from the Yarra at Yarra Glen that has been used already upstream. Recycled water can be at a better quality to what enters our dams now. It is widely used overseas with no complaints and is far cheaper than desal or new dams. I believe that the citizerns of London use water that has been through about 3 dams and treatment plants along the way to them.

We could stop logging in the catchment basins for a start.And desalination requires a lot of electricity - so I suppose we'll be reliant on the existing coal stations for some time yet to come. Theres a lot more than can be done regarding water saving when you look at our consumption versus other developed places.

The Thomson Dam was built a third of a century ago to provide a reserve supply to drought proof a city of 3 million. The problem is that Melbourne now has 4 million people, so it's used for ordinary water supply. It's only fed by two relatively small rivers, but that's all that's required to fill a very big dam which was just meant to be a drought reserve.

The problem is that the Thomson was built, Melbourne just stopped building water supply for the first time in 140 years.

So the Thomson has a vast and unused storage capacity. This could be utilised by building tiny diversion weirs on central and east Gippsland streams such as the Tyers, Macalister, Avon, and Mitchell rivers and piping winter and spring peak flows to the Thomson Reservoir. There would be no need to take any of the modest summer and autumn flows.

This would cost a fraction of the absurd and wasteful desal plant and be fairly environmentally friendly. Only the most rabid Greenie would seriously object to it. It would also mitigate floods and not take water from these rivers when farmers need it for irrigation.