Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

FLOODS: WATER STORAGE MONITORING
Wednesday, 1 June 2011 COUNCIL 1649
direct conflict, suing each other or cost shifting to each
other. One may be implementing a practice that causes
direct loss to the other. They might be arguing over
who is going to fix up a road. Never has it been the case
that a council is required to vote in such a way that it
will be consistent with state government policy. That
adds a third plank to my level of concern about this
particular government venture.
Clearly government members are rattled for a reason. I
am not suggesting it is an overreaction by
inexperienced politicians; I am suggesting that
government members do not like the impact that the
ethical paper pledge is having out there on the market,
which is at some sort of tipping point. Nobody wants to
support the sort of destruction that you will see hidden
in those valleys behind Healesville when you get off the
beaten track.
The Minister for Agriculture and Food Security has
responsibility for all those who want to grow trees on
their own land at their own risk, as well as to their
competitor, VicForests. I think the minister and the
Deputy Premier have lost track of what they are here
for. We will see more such overreactions and
heavy-handedness not just in this one area but in any
area that proves to be a sore point for the government at
that particular time.
Motion agreed to.
FLOODS: WATER STORAGE
MONITORING
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I move:
That this house requests the Minister for Water to conduct an
urgent review of the operating rules for all major water
storages so as to minimise potential flood risks on regulated
rivers.
I notice from the government press release that this
week has been designated Flood Awareness Week,
during which citizens are being given instructions on
how they can help through their action to minimise
their own flood risk. This motion asks the state
government to take action in order to mitigate
everybody’s flood risk in relation to regulated rivers.
My rationale for this motion has arisen from the floods
we experienced earlier this year. Some of those floods
were the immediate result of flash flooding in
unregulated rivers, but north of the Divide the worst
devastation was seen on rivers which all have large
dams at their headwaters and where the flow of those
rivers has traditionally been strictly regulated.
I am not pointing the finger at anybody with this
motion. Of course we have just had a decade of drought
during which nobody would have turned their mind to
this. Over the past five years I have visited the area
around Lake Eppalock several times. If I had been
standing, as I was, at the bottom of Lake Eppalock
when it was a dry dust bowl, it never would have
occurred to me that our biggest risk coming down the
line was going to be a flood from that dam onto the
river and downstream communities. However, we have
an opportunity to learn from this recent experience.
With water storages being as full as they are around the
state, it is urgent that we deal with this issue before the
arrival of winter rains, spring rains or even the
unseasonal summer rains that finally tipped the balance
on the Lake Eppalock system.
I attended one of the public meetings of the Comrie
inquiry into the flood disaster in Rochester. At that
meeting a member of the public stated that this was a
man-made flood. I knew what he was referring to,
because I had observed and tracked the extraordinary
situation with Lake Eppalock, which had been all but
empty for decades up until August last year. In the
space of a week or so in September the lake had risen to
two-thirds full, by December it was just below full and
then became over-full and in fact extremely full in
January, leading to the overtopping of the dam and
floodwaters pouring down to Rochester. By one
measure this was the largest flood we have on record —
that is, from the public record of flow rates, which is
still available on a departmental website going back to
the 1970s. Prior to the 1990s there was a big flood
every year — a big one in the 1970s, a big one in the
1980s and a big one in the 1990s — there was nothing
in the 2000s and then the biggest of all in terms of rates
in January this year.
Lake Eppalock is a significantly large storage which, as
I said, filled up extraordinarily quickly — 300 gigalitres
and beyond — as the water tried to crowd out over that
spillway. Even though the dam was technically at a
level of 100 per cent, another few metres of water
standing over the spillway causes a backward pressure
that fills the dam to an even greater level across its large
surface area. Lake Eppalock has only a small regulated
outlet which is used for irrigation releases of
1000 megalitres or so a day. There have been calls for
that to be expanded to 10 000 gigalitres.
Having studied the rates of inflow and outflow and
storage at Lake Eppalock with data that is now
available, it is clear to me that with a 10-gigalitre
storage, with some degree of foresight and some
different operating rules, the amplitude of this flood
could have been reduced; there is no doubt about it.