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OT - Raising Warragamba 3-Mar-2013 At 3:18:52 PM Estey

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On 2/03/2013 lacto wrote:
>Raising the storage and raising the flood mitigation are 2 completely separate
>senarios increasing storage would devastate wereas flood mitigation may
>innundate for very short periods from a few hours to maybe a week with
>aprobability of 1 in 100+ years .

Hey Lacto, just wondering if you have any inside knowledge on this? The consultants report linked further up this thread clearly has an agenda and that is to support additional flood mitigation capability in Warragamba Dam. The section in the report about the impact on the upstream environment may not be the whole story. As you note this depends on how quickly the water is released following the flood peak. This in turn will depend on design and policy. Is there a definitive preferred design out there? Until there is it may be a bit premature to conclude upstream impacts are negligiable.

>The problem HAS TO BE addressed as huge suburban development is already
>impacted by foods with continuous new development and the new standards
>would throw liability back on the government if the upgrades arent carried
>out .

I wish I could disagree with you. Inappropriate development has been going on the Hawkesbury-Nepean flood plain since Governor Macquarie was punching on with the squatter aristocracy in the early 19th century.

DaveN alluded to the last time a similar proposal came up in the 1990s. This is only my opinion only but while the conservation campaign at the time may have contributed to the scrapping of the flood mitigation component of the dam upgrade, the major factor for not going ahead with it was cost.

That cost benefit equation has changed drastically since. There are a bunch reasons for this such as an increase in government insurance costs following natural disasters in Victoria and Qld, changes in flood risk modelling predicting more frequent severe flooding, and the uncertainty over the impact of climate change.

So to answer the OP- Some good, some bad depending on your point of view, but sadly inevitable.