The Rain Forest comes to Gwondanaland

With the water restrictions now largely lifted I decided to re-install some misters and a few drip irrigation points to my little patch of gwondanaland. I had left it pretty much to its own devices over the past few years but the hot weather we often get in february really hit the fern hard over the past couple of years, and I lost a couple of smaller tree ferns and some ground ferns. Hopefully this year the occasional misting will keep my little patch of rain forest vibrant, if nothing else it helps significantly cool the house on those baking hot days,

Something for April Fool's Day

Its official Melbourne's water storages are currently 32.1% full (as at 1/4/2007). Despite the rain the overall storage is still falling. Some dams are rising by other failing a lot. Should this be a problem? The common explanation seems to be that the soil is taking up all the moisture and keeping run-off into the dams minimum. Another explaination is water may to be being shunted around.

The aprils fool day message bit is that this should have triggered level4 restrictions. However the Victorian government, or more specifically those politicians based in Melbourne,has gone a bot weak at the knees and changed the rules. So now we are have a claytons change to the rules when a real change to the rules could have had a bit of a voter backlash. So now we have water restriction level 3a.

Where did the water go?

The water levels of Melbourne's dams are now published daily, and a surprising number of people are well informed on the levels. Today "The Sunday Age" had a story about the bit dry (it has actually rained for two days now) and mentioned that the dam levels fell 0.1%, in a sidebar, strangely the article only indicated 8mm of rain in the past 24 hours and the rainfall section back a bit only showed 1.5mm. I can tell you it rained more than that. Checking on the net I could see that the average around melbourne was 24mm and some place over 40mm in some places (mainly the areas were our water catchments and dams are). This which is closer to what I expected.

So what is going on here. Well I found one likely cause, the news paper story is probably not basing its discussion on up to date data. It appears to be based on Melbourne Water's website (which at the time of writing had not been updated for the recent rains.)

This melbourne water conserve water website is interesting, it gives all the dam levels and also mention that melbournes consupmtion (on average, and that means without water restrictions is 500 giga litres, which is 500,000 megalitres). The full capacity of our dams from this source is 1,773,000 megalitres which is about three and a half years supply. We are now down to 66,577 megalitres and that thens leave close enough to 1.32 years of unrestricted use. Sorry haven't managed to track down the about of water that is expected to be saved by the restrictions.

The inaccuracy of the newspaper report asided, does all the panic about water and water restrictions really seem like we are despeate and about to run out of water? Over a years worth does seem ok to me when much of northern victorian has virtually none left, but to me it is even harded to justify expensive TV adds to dob in water wasters.

Or is the urgency perhaps more to do with political spin!

Level 3 water restrictions begin

Due to the drought (and clearly a lot of inaction at government local authority levels) dam levels are low and melbourne has been put on level 3 water restrictions.



Rather than give up and let my garden dry out and die, and/or just complain. I think I should work out how best to look after my plants. I also though this might make an interesting thread on the blogsphere.

The irony of all this is that it was probably all the plant life back in the creataceous that help lower CO2, raise oxygen and begin cooling the earth. Perhaps they have more justifiable rights to water, and will make better use of it than man?