Calling for smarter water management, protestors wearing masks gathered outside the Rous County Council building in Lismore this morning to declare their opposition to the proposed new dam at Dunoon.

The protestors were members of the newly formed alliance, WATER Northern Rivers – and they presented the water authority with 280 paper submissions objecting to the new dam.

Read more news: Channon Dunoon Dam causing more than waves

WATER Northern Rivers spokesperson Annie Kia, said tomorrow was the last day for the public to hand in submissions expressing their views on the planned dam to the water authority.

New report

“We want Rous County Council to pause in the process of planning this new dam, especially since a new report from Professor Stuart White from UTS in Sydney has shown that the dam is unnecessary and would increase the cost of water significantly,” she said.

“Professor White’s report says that the Rous assessment process failed to adequately analyse and cost better water efficiency, and that it incorrectly applied the concept of marginal cost in comparing options.

“In view of this report, we call on Rous County Council to stop promoting the dam, and to adopt a management approach that values water at every part of its journey.”

Annie said the way forward instead, was to invest in system-wide water efficiency, as undertaken by the City of Sydney – which then successfully increased its population by one million people without any extra water usage.

“This involves auditing all the water pipes in the system, including schools, hospitals, aged care residences, government buildings and universities – every faucet, appliance and policy,” she said.

“Then fixing it means more jobs are also created to address the issues where water is lost."

Will the cost of water go up?

Annie said Rous’ general manager already confirmed to Councillors that the cost of water will increase four fold.

“Rous sells to local government and the dam costs at present are $245 million – it’s on their website,” she said.

“It’s a huge infrastructure cost and we know these builds blow out, Professor White looks at this and analyses the costs.

“He offers a different way of thinking about this and has worked with Egypt, Oman and the Phillipines on these modern approaches to water systems.

“Sydney City put a big investment in it and got a big return on it, making incredible gains in the system.

"We lose water all the way on its journey.

“It’s a mad notion that we need to raise water to the highest drinking standard and use it to flush toilets and mix cement.

‘We collect energy on roofs here, but we are not good at harvesting water.

Picture by David Lowe of the area to be flooded for the dam.

Lismore Square

“Lismore Square has a big roof and when they put rain tanks on, they collected the water and flush toilets with it – it’s their big water use. We can all do so much better.”

Annie also said some councils dealt with water efficiency better than others. She cited Ballina Council’s purple pipe water reuse scheme and how it was used to feed water to new housing developments.

“If the Lismore North Plateau development goes ahead, Lismore City Council still have no plans to take clean water to the development for reuse through the purple pipe system.

“If we go ahead with the dam, we lose the opportunity to get a water system we can be proud of. 

Local resident, David Lowe has created video footage and pictures of the rare and endangered rainforest in The Channon Gorge, which would be destroyed by the new dam wall.

Environment

“This dam is destructive all round. It would obliterate Aboriginal Heritage. It would drown exceptionally rare rainforests. And with its eye-watering price-tag of $240 million dollars, it would increase the cost of water to consumers and industry."

Annie said the plan to flood the Dunoon/Channon valley would destroy “quite an amazing place”.

"There is only 1% of the Big Scrub Rainforest left and the dam would destroy an important part of what remains, and with it, endangered ecological communities, and threatened species,” she said.

MP Hogan

Page MP Kevin Hogan said "our area is good at catching water on the roof", but that government needed to look closer at policies that could restrict the ways we gather water from roof tops.

“The issue here is we have is we have a growing population with a demand for more water and more energy,” he said.

“Rous do a lot of work on this and there’s currently a public consultation and we’ll see what comes back.”

Links

Professor Stuart White’s documents reports can be viewed here:

Brief summary: http://www.bit.ly/Prof-Stuart-White-Rous-Water-augmentation-proposal

Slides in PDF form: http://www.bit.ly/Prof-Stuart-White-Rous-slides

Anyone interested in submitting their views to Rous County Council can do so by emailing [email protected] or get ideas from the Facebook page Dunoon/ the Channon Dam Proposal Forum