BY Engelbert Schmidl
COLD water is being poured over Liberal plans to dam the Maribyrnong River at Keilor.
State Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu last week confirmed his party was considering damming the river at Arundel, as part of its election water policy.
The man behind the dam, former Melbourne Water engineer Geoff Crapper, estimated it would cost between $60 million to $100 million to build.
Mr Crapper said it would protect the lower Maribyrnong area from floods, provide additional water reserves, and flush from the river algal bloom, an ecosystem-destroying bacteria.
Mr Crapper has worked as a consultant for Water Technology, a water management services firm.
He said the proposal was in no way connected to his private consultancy work. However, Mr Crapper’s former employer last week rejected the plan outright.
Melbourne Water said the proposal had been reviewed and rejected because a dam at Arundel would yield only minimal new drinking water.
Melbourne Water managing director Rob Skinner said a 10 billion litre capacity dam at Arundel would provide only an extra two billion litres of drinking water, if the health of the river was to be maintained.
“If only minimal environmental flows were maintained, our figures indicate that a reliable yield of about 6000 million litres, or less than a 1 per cent increase in Melbourne’s total system storage could be possible, but this would obviously come at a significant environmental cost,” Mr Skinner said.
“Flows in the Maribyrnong River are unreliable, and in more than one-in-four years it is likely there would be limited yield and water for Melbourne.
“As such, the dam would have very little extra benefit for Melbourne’s storages in dry weather.”
Paul Sinclair, Environment Victoria’s director of healthy rivers, said the Arundel dam was an outdated idea.
“It’s a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem,” he said.
Mr Sinclair said conserving resources was the answer to water shortage.
“We’ve got so many dams in Victoria, it’s not solving our problem to build more,” he said.
Brimbank City Council said it was supportive of initiatives to secure water supply, provided they were financially and environmentally sound.
“More efficient water use, and initiatives such as storm water harvesting and water recycling are more likely to be solutions to the water crisis,” a council spokesman said.
