Here is a map of all rain stations in the Wellington Dam catchment – marked by the green line. You can make your own map at CDO –
Once you have the map scaled to where you want – if you left click on the station dots, a link to the daily data pops up.
Wellington Dam was built by the Commonwealth in 1933 and enlarged in 1956 – it has the largest catchment in the South West and the second largest in Western Australia at ~2,500 square kms (after Ord River Dam) – and is fed by the Collie River. Combined Perth water supply catchments are ~3,500 squ kms.
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Wellington Dam has salinity problems due to over clearing and the water is little utilized by anybody now – Harvey irrigators have at times used some of the water and I have asked for the time series of that usage and it has not been emailed to me. Over a decade ago the Agritech consortium developed a proposal to desalinate the saline (~3,000ppm solids) wastewater from the dam and supply this to the Perth water supply. Various Govt water Depts and quangos have fought this proposal tooth and nail for years with the tenacity of a starving rottweiler defending a leg of beef. Alternative Govt proposals have been floated over a decade to utilize Wellington Dam water but nothing has come to fruition that I am aware of. Wellington Dam has overflowed in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2013, 2014 – which should be embarrassing for the dog-in-the-manger WA Govt as much of this potentially useful water goes to waste. The Ancient Romans were better water managers than the WA Govt.
I applaud Warwick for today’s blog and more particularly his accurate criticism of the State Government and it’s inefficient and out of touch agencies, in regard to sporadic and incomplete rainfall data.
The Government continues it’s contradictory water policy by continuing to ignore Wellington Dam, by allowing this iconic masterpiece to rot and not provide the function it was built for.
This dam is by any standard very large at 186GL capacity and on average is holding more than the 11 Perth metropolitan dams and has a long history of overflowing.
Originally constructed to supply water to towns in the Great Southern and then later to the coastal strip for dairy farms, irrigation, fruit and vegetable crops and livestock.
Despite all the promises in the World by the Government and their agencies to fix the dam over the past 35 years, it has been necessary to discontinue the supply to the towns and the irrigation and dairy farmers are handing back their licenses because of the salt load it’s putting on their crops and pasture.
All of the Governments plans to fix the dam have ended in disaster and at great expense to the taxpayers but their real crime is the continuing waste and neglect by yet another failed plan.
Their audacious plan was/is to scour the more saline water from the base of the dam in what they call the scouring season, which runs from June until November and while they don’t scour every day, each day that they do, discharges 450,000 tonnes or 450,000,000 litres per day or 45 billion litres annually.
Putting the above into perspective Perth’s annual daily water use is 650,000,000 litres per day, meaning 66% of that is discharged to the sea by scouring.
The real irony is that this water is less than 3,000 ppm when it reaches the sea approx. 14 kms south of the Binningup seawater desal plant which treats water of 36,000ppm.
I put up a well thought out and costed project, which would take the scour water at the dam, run it down the Darling escarpment and through a desal plant near the sea, but instead of using expensive fossil fuel generated power, in our plant it was free. It’s called hydraulic or hydrostatic head or gravity and this power source is free, has no capital cost, no running or operating cost, doesn’t stop when there is no sunlight or wind and has no moving parts.
The proposition put to the Government was that we would build it, own it and operate it at no financial cost or engineering risk to the Government or taxpayers of WA.
On today’s Government water prices, our project would save the taxpayers $3.0B and climbing.
Am I stupid or are they?
Waterguru
Peter, is the hydrostatic head alone sufficient to force the water thru a membrane to achieve desalination? I can see how in principle it could work, but know nothing about the engineering.
It would be an elegant solution if workable.
Yes, it should work . You can buy a reverse osmosis system for your home see this reverseosmosissystemsreview.com/how-does-reverse-osmosis-work.html At home I have a two stage filter (1st ceramic to take out sediment & discoloring 2nd active carbon to remove chlorine & any bacteria) You can taste the effect of removing chlorine from the tap water. The 1st filter is very clean because the water comes from a deep dam with almost rain forest catchment. The 2nd filter lasts one to two years. Getting the salt level from 3000ppm to around 100ppm would not be to difficult and could easily be done in a desalination plant designed for sea water at 30,000ppm.
Pity WA does not have a Professional Engineers Act as does Queensland or those incompetents at the water authority could be charged.
Hi Philip,
Thanks for your quick response which indicates to me that you don’t work for the government or Water Corporation.
Not only does it work but even after desalination there is still enough force to run a series of mini hydro’s.
If you can send your email address I can send the info, together with a great graphic and a comparison report that compares our project with the Kwinana and Binningup seawater desal plants.
I would also point out, as you will see in the report, it is the only water project put forward that exactly meets the criteria as set out by Infrastructure Australia.
Email me at agritechsmartwater@gmail.com