Sydney's got water again!

The big rain event of a few weeks ago worked wonders on Sydney's water supply. We've gone from 40% and falling dangerously, to over 80% and time to relax about it again.
 
So off to Warragamba Dam, and Lake Burragorang reservoir, the other day.

The visitor centre is open most days, and on weekends you can walk over the dam.

I think I mentioned once before about how Sydney's big reservoir compares with that of my home town, Birmingham England. They're very proud of their Elan Valley reservoir and dam there. Well it turns out that Sydney's Lake Burragorang is actually 40 times bigger than Birmingham's.

Dry, drier, driest

  

The Centennial Park ponds are extremely dry right now, after this worst of all droughts. I went to check them out today.









Here's Busbys Pond.


















This one is Kensington Pond.




























The driest of them all is Randwick Pond.

Hay & hay, and the worst ever drought (but don't ever mention climate change)

We came back through inland NSW after our Adelaide trip, and the town of Hay presented itself once again as a convenient overnight stop.

The trucks were coming through by the minute, full of hay from Victoria, bound for the drought-stricken regions around here, and to the north, the east, and the west.
 

Most of SE Australia is in drought. It's bad. It's the worst drought since European settlement at least. Businesses are going broke. The mighty Murrumbidgee River is almost totally dry.


Our pathetic federal government is pretending to care, splashing around rather small sums of money as 'drought relief'. They somehow can't bring themselves to articulate the words 'climate change'.

Couldn't be anything to do with that, surely? If it was, they'd have to do something about it, wouldn't they? What would their coal industry benefactors think of that?

I read yesterday that even in Sydney the soil is 1000mm in rainfall deficit, and that's more than a year's average precipitation gone missing. Out west it's a lot more serious still.

The Coorong

I know the Coorong district mostly because of Storm Boy, the excellent film from 1976 about the young boy and Mr Percival, his pelican friend. There's been a recent film remake this year, though some reviewers wondered why. The Coorong is also the name of the long lake stretching down from the mouth of the River Murray.

Anyway, we passed by there on our way to Adelaide. It's looking rather dry, as is a lot of south eastern Australia. After all, much of the water that was supposed to flow down to here has been stolen by irrigators upstream. The drought has taken most of the rest, I suspect.





At Meningie we stopped for a toilet break, and I read about South Australia's 'only genuine bushranger', as I think he was described, John Francis Peggotty, the Birdman of the Coorong. He rode about on an ostrich, no less!

Bromeliad time

Our bromeliads are in full bloom again. They never let us down - unlike all those azaleas and things that didn't survive the drought.

Don't they look good!