JOHN Scales refused to believe the doomsayers when they predicted there would never again be enough rain to fill the Dartmouth Dam in northeast Victoria.
A third-generation mountain farmer who helped build Victoria’s largest dam in the 1970s, Mr Scales was always convinced the decade-long drought that accompanied the new millennium was nothing more than a normal, if prolonged, dry spell.
“I’m not a believer in global warming, despite some people saying it wouldn’t ever rain here like it used to because the climate had changed,” he said yesterday.
“I was always confident it was just a long drought like we’ve had before, and that we would pull out of it just as we always do.”
The local cattleman and pub owner – who knows this mountainous Mitta Mitta River country like few others – was right.
Sitting in a fishing boat surrounded by the dam’s still-rising inky waters, Mr Scales happily admits to knowing precisely, as he always does, that the Dartmouth dam is now 72.8 per cent full.
He predicts that if the spring rains continue, the water storage that is so vital to the prosperity of irrigation farmers along the Murray River and to Adelaide’s drinking water supply, will be full by next year.
Around the nation, water storage reserves are at levels not seen since the start of the decade-long drought in the late 90s.
The Bureau of Meteorology estimates Australia’s 261 largest drinking water and irrigation storages, with a total capacity of 78 million megalitres of water, are on average 80 per cent full. This time last year, the figure was 65 per cent.
Drinking water supplies for the major cities have been replenished by the wettest 10-month period ever recorded, between July last year and April. Sydney’s city water storages are now 79 per cent full, while dams supplying Adelaide and Brisbane are at a healthy 83 per cent capacity.
Even Melbourne’s once critically low dams have climbed to 63 per cent full with recent rainfall, their highest levels in 12 years. Melbourne’s largest supply dam, the Thomson, is this week half-full for the first time since 2005.
The anomaly is Perth, which is still critically dry, relying on desalination plants and aquifers for 60 per cent of its water supplies.
The bureau’s manager of climate prediction, Andrew Watkins, said the reason dam levels such as the Thomson and Dartmouth were continuing to climb – even though rainfall has been less than normal since May – was because soils were saturated.
“With wet soils, runoff has not immediately decreased,” Dr Watkins said yesterday. The high storage levels come from “a combination of good sustained rain over several months, and the soil becoming wet enough to allow rainfall to flow in the catchments even after the big wet ended”.
The filling of the giant Dartmouth Dam is an extraordinary feat that has happened just three times since the vast reservoir in the remote Victorian high country was commissioned in 1980.
Only in 1990, 1993 and 1997 has water overflowed from the four-million-megalitre dam and thundered down its 180m drop spillway. It’s a far cry from this time last year, when the Dartmouth Dam was just 26 per cent full.
Now holding 2.8 million ML of water, according to operators Goulburn-Murray Water, it’s a rejuvenation that has tourists, anglers and irrigation farmers flocking to enjoy the dam’s beauty and plentiful trout.
