Bart Bear's Blog

Last weekend was a long weekend. The weather was not so good, cloudy and showers so obviously the choices were stay in bed or drive somewhere interesting. No choice really, so we made a dam good weekend of it. That is, we went and checked some dams. Now for years the dams in this part of Australia have been getting emptier and emptier. The rain just hasn't been falling. They say it's because of somebody called El Nino. But now things have changed and we are getting skads of rain. The dams are filling up again and the dry old country is looking green. So green that some cows and horses are getting into trouble by eating too much fresh green grass. These are two of the dams we visited. The top one is Burrinjuck Dam, about two hours drive out of Canberra. It was built in 1928 to supply water to the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, one of Australia's most important farming areas. The good news is that it is totally full. The drive to the dam gets a bit hairy near the end. The road is narrow and winding and has some steep drops off the edge in places. You can't get any closer to the dam wall than the spot we were at, so you can't see the narrow valley that the dam is built across (of course you can always Google Earth it). All you can see is the control building on the top of the dam wall. The Oldies said "dam" about that. The bottom dam, Googong Dam, is the important one for Canberra because it is where most of the water for Canberra and Queanbeyan is taken from. There are other dams in the Canberra supply system. One of them is being extended right now and I will get pictures of the work soon. Googong was nearly dry last year but now it is around 75% full again. You could walk right across the dam wall the last time we were there, but now there is a lot of construction going on at the spillway on the far side and the dam is fenced off. The Oldies said "dam" about that too.

Labels: Canberra, dam, engineering