ENVIRONMENTAL flows appear to offer the best chance for Lake Hume’s airspace to be increased.
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Murray-Darling Basin Authority executive director river management David Dreverman told a public meeting at Corowa on Wednesday night that the 97 per cent full mark, which allows for three per cent airspace, could be altered off the back of environmental flows.
He said his organisation had been working with the states on the issue.
“You can use your environmental portfolio to underwrite a different airspace volume,” Mr Dreverman said.
“We have been looking at options that include 200 gigalitres of airspace rather than the three per cent that we’ve basically run this year, so that would be six per cent airspace.”
Flooded Murray River landholders repeatedly criticised the authority at the meeting for keeping Lake Hume high in the face of forecasts for a wet spring.
The authority’s senior operations director Joseph Davis said “we did not take our eye off the ball and we managed the flood very well”, an assertion greeted with derision.
“We stopped Albury going to a major flood event, that was one of our main objectives,” Mr Davis said.
Mr Dreverman stressed his main priority was to ensure irrigators had adequate water.
He downplayed the recent flooding.
“This is a wet year, but it is not an extreme wet year,” Mr Dreverman said.
“It is not a 1917, it is not an 1870, it is not a 1956, it is not a 1974.”
Former Victorian politician and Lake Mulwala irrigator Bill Baxter suggested the authority’s charter should be reviewed to account for modern technology.
“Now we can measure things so much more accurately than we have been able to in the past it may well be worth exploring that, if the catchment is saturated and we can measure the saturation point, may be that 97 per cent has a degree of flexibility,” Mr Baxter said.
“Now I mightn’t get support from my irrigator friends on that, but I see the problem from both sides and I just wonder whether in the discussions that take place from here on in that there can’t be some looking at whether new technology would enable a more accurate read on the various scenarios.”
Mr Dreverman said a Hume catchment trial was being done with the British weather bureau on rain forecasts based on grids of five square kilometres.
Other topics addressed at the meeting were communications around downstream rises, the impact of Lake Dartmouth on mitigating floods and the need to prepare for inundations as the climate changes.
