CENTURION wrote:The Sleeping Giant wrote:But south Australia also restricts the natural flow.
if we didn't have locks & weirs, there would be NO water in the river in South Australia, in 2007 the only reason we had ANY water (which almost turned to green algae) was due to the virtual damming of the water. The dry lakebeds in Lake Alexandrina & Albert turned acidic the river was very close to dying.
Spot on, the Locks enabled SA to maintain some water in the main channel from 2007 to 2010. Also, many of the wetlands that fringe the main channel of the Murray were temporarily blocked by earth banks in an attempt to keep as much water in the main channel as possible. There still wasn't enough with sections of the main channel below Blanchtown so shallow you could walk across the River and Lakes Alexandrina and Albert water levels falling below sea level where normally they would sit at around 0.75 metres above sea level. Highly acidic soils on exposed lake beds and saline water from the lack of flow, river bank collapses in the lower Murray reaches, wetlands drying out and turning acidic, levee banks cracking and failing, prime floodplain farming country dried out and was decimated through salinity and acidity, the South lagoon of the Coorong went 5 times more saline than sea water, and the severe ecological impacts that these unprecedented conditions created were all the consequences of insufficient flow to keep the River alive. The economic impacts were disastrous for farming (many of the Dairies on lake Albert shut down permanently, viticulture around Langhorne Creek and Currency Creek all but ceased, and the jobless rate skyrocketed, many people left the area creating an economic void in affected towns and communities) There were a number of health issues that this created also, both physical and mental and these impacts were strongly felt throughout the Lower Murray Communities. Things were desperate to say the least as all of a suden we were in the middle of an economic, social and environmental disaster with no control over the cause. Very scary times that we certainly do not want to see again, not just in SA, but anywhere in Australia.
In some ways this was the wake up call we needed, it had been coming since 1981 when for the first time in recorded history, the Murray Mouth closed. We need to take this experience and use it to rectify the situation with the Murray. It is easy to sit back now and squabble over who's water is who's as it really doesn't matter at the moment - there is plenty to go round. But should the situation that unfolded here between 2007 and 2010 arise again, in SA or somewhere else, and we had an opportunity to avoid it or at least minimise the impacts as we now do through the Basin Plan, and that opportunity wasn't taken, I would suggest that we as a nation were either ignorent, foolish, or just plain stupid. We cannot afford for that to happen again - anywhere.