The world is going crazy!

[Ric]

How's this for a situation straight out of "Yes Minister"

The "North-South pipeline" was built at great cost to bring water from Lake Eildon to Melbourne.
It is released from the Eildon dam, flows down the Goulburn River to Yea, then is pumped down the 70km pipeline to Sugarloaf Reservoir.
To ease concerns about Melbourne stealing water from the country, the legislation was written that all water to be pumped had to be specifically requested and released from Lake Eildon, they can't just take natural flows from the Goulburn River.

Now, the Goulburn River is in flood, so they can't release any water from Eildon or it would add to the flood.
The legislation prevents them from just taking the natural flow from the flooding river, so...........
the pipeline has just been shut down until the floods subside!

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/pipeline-shut-after-adding-to-flood-level-20100907-14zm3.html

[smythie]

That's hilarious

[Kevlar GT]

I'm happy to hear it's a state government issue so the finger can't be pointed at my home town, Canberra, for being at fault!

What a friggin joke, surely they could amend the legislation to include a clause for natural flow during times of flood (minimun levels to determine flood etc).

[LOWLIB]

ahh politics... wouldnt they want to get as much of this flood water as posibible and pretty much try to fill their reserves right up so that they didnt have people wondering and worrying about melbourne running out of water..

prob to logical for the state governments of australia to think of

[smythie]

As the news article states though, the North/South pipeline only supplies the Sugarloaf reservoir. This isn't a particularly large reservoir in comparison to the Upper Yarra and Thompson reservoirs.

The water in this reservoir cannot be pumped into another reservoir - the only way out for the water once in there is through the treatment plant and into the rest of MW's distribution network. That network doesn't have much holding capacity (two or three day's water usage - Melbourne uses a bit over 1000ML per day generally) and is generally held fairly high in any case. Sugarloaf is as of today's information at 87.2% already and MW wouldn't really want it to be much higher for contingency reasons.