NEXT time you go to water your garden – think twice.
Daylight Saving ended on the weekend and the Port Macquarie-Hastings Council has revamped the times you can water your garden
Watering used to be permitted between 6.30am and 7am and between 6pm and 6.30pm (according to the odds and evens system). However, now it is between 5pm and 5.30pm. The odds and evens system will still apply.
Level 3 water restrictions also remain in place despite the recent rain.
The council’s water and sewer group manager Andrew Doig said the council had been forced to stop high-level pumping from the Hastings River because of high nutrient levels and it would take at least one month after pumping recommences for storage levels to reach 85 per cent – the trigger to ease restrictions from level 3 back to 1 (the council does not use level 2).
Mr Doig said pumping water high in nutrients into the council’s off-creek storages would encourage growth of blue-green algae and cause other unwanted outbreaks.
He said local water restriction trigger levels were storage based – not flow based as many people believe. While there have been calls for the council to build bigger dams, he said the long-term issue was not with the council’s storage capacity but with its ability to pump from the Hastings River.
Since August last year, he said, the council had only been able to operate its high volume pump for one week because of low river flows. During this time the council had been forced to rely on stored water. Both dams had been drawn down significantly over the space of eight months and simply couldn’t be re-filled overnight.
“There is no guarantee that the river flow will remain stable for a long enough period to fill the dam storages,” Mr Doig said.
“This has been a feature now for the last two years where we have experienced low to no flows in the river punctuated by floods with only small windows of ‘normal’ river flow.”
