Tougher Curbs Hover Despite The Rain
The Age
Monday June 30, 2003
A low-pressure weather system over Mount Gambier has delivered some good rain to Victoria's farmers, but falls over Melbourne's main catchment area remain elusive.
Melbourne Water's managing director Brian Bayley said the city's water catchments were hovering at 40.4 per cent full, just a hair over the 40 per cent trigger for harsher water restrictions.
The good news is that the Upper Yarra storage has received about 15 millimetres of rain since Friday evening, but at the large Thomson Reservoir in Gippsland the falls were only about six millimetres.
Mr Bayley said the recent rain had wet the soil in the catchment areas, so that any follow-up rain would flow into the reservoirs rather than soak into the ground.
He said this meant that if Bureau of Meteorology predictions of normal rainfall for the rest of the year were correct, Melbourne might avoid level two restrictions.
``But if we are going to get the storages back to normal levels, we are going to need more - we are going to need above-average rainfalls and no one is saying that is likely," he said.
Other parts of the state have had reason to feel upbeat.
The Bureau of Meteorology reports that places hit by the drought, such as Horsham, Kerang and Mildura, have received good falls.
In the west, Horsham has received more than 20 millimetres over the weekend.
This should help boost local water storages which have been averaging around 6 per cent full.
At Kerang, where farmers have been missing decent rain for two years, 12 millimetres were recorded. Mildura got more than 10. The catchment for Lake Eildon also had decent falls. The lake, which provides water for the high-value fruit and dairy industries of the Goulburn Valley, has been at less than 10 per cent capacity, meaning irrigators faced the prospect of almost no water for the coming year.
Bureau forecaster Peter Blake said the town of Eildon received seven millimetres to 9am yesterday but Jamieson, in the Upper Goulburn catchment, received 30 millimetres the day before.
© 2003 The Age
