blogs > andrew > travel > australia > so-much-rain

Tue, 10 Jul 2007

So much rain it’s almost British

Australia in general and Sydney in particular have been in the grips of a long term “drought”. One way this is measured here on the coast is by considering the water levels available in the dams that provide Sydney’s water supply. When I first became conscious that water levels were a concern the percentage capacity available was in the mid 40s; this past Christmas it was down as low as 33%.

While this still represents 4-5 odd years of drinking water, it nevertheless is the kind of long term trend that is pretty worrying for urban planners, leading to talk of desalinization plants and immediate opposition owing to the energy cost of such efforts. (Strangely, forcing the local utilities to reduce the massive leakage from their pipes never seems to come up in public debates)

This year has been a bit different, though. To the great chagrin of those doing agriculture inland (whose farms, somewhat unfortunately, are in the middle of large deserts and really are devastated by the continuing drought), it has been bloody pouring here on the coast. While I understand the federal political necessity to keep saying “we’re in a drought”, it raises a certain amount of cogitative dissonance every time one looks out the widow. Our summer this year was terrible, supposedly due to a) el nino [you can blame el nino for anything — it’s great! who can prove you wrong?] which caused to b) it raining almost every day since December.

This has, however, finally been good for the dams. Water levels went from 33% to 38%, and people were pretty excited.

And then June happened

I was out of Australia for much of June. Thank God: in just one month look at what happened to the dam levels:

Now that’s net inflow!

Put in perspective, over the last 5 years the plot looks like this:

This information from the amusingly named iliveinsydney.com website, a source of not just great information about what goes on with Sydney’s water supply, but practical advice about rainwater tanks and irrigation that anyone with gardens, lawns, or urban forests in their care would be interested in.

AfC

so-much-rain, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/travel/australia at 08:51, 10 Jul 2007.

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