Melbourne’s water storages are 65.7% empty (59.9% this time last year). Gunk at the bottom of the dams pollutes some of the water. As the drought continues, natural run-off into dams is insignificant because most of the rain is absorbed by a huge quantity of dead vegetation and transpired by thirsty trees and scrub.

Intense bushfires devastated about 2 million hectares of the Murray-Darling and Snowy River Catchments in 2003 and another 1 million hectares in North-East Victoria and Gippsland in 2006-07. Rain in those catchments caused, and continues to cause, flash floods, mudslides and millions of tonnes of topsoil to shift. The quality (and quantity) of Melbourne’s water is at serious risk from a similar event.

The Million dollar questions are:

Will Melbourne’s water storage cope with a major intense bushfire in their catchments?

What can be done to minimise that risk, get more potable water running into the Dams and make direct attack on bushfires within the catchments easier and safer?

Professor Mark Adams on ABC Catalyst program Fire and Water 1/5/08, said:

“So if you can use fire to control fuels without creating mass regeneration, then we will suffer less, if you like. We won’t lose as much water. Whereas if we let major fires run unchecked, where we have very high intensity fires over millions of hectares, then we create mass regeneration and that will really move things to the upper limit of our estimates, of the loss of water.”

Guest Speaker:
Professor Mark Adams, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, University of New South Wales.

Acknowledgement and thanks

The Stretton Group is grateful for the very generous support by Gary Morgan and Michele Levine of Roy Morgan Research for their most generous assistance in helping with the production of this quality document. Without their help, and that of their staff, the important environmental messages provided by our speaker could not have been available to the public at large.

Speaker:

The Stretton Group thanks our guest speaker for his excellent presentation:

Professor Mark Adams, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, University of New South Wales.

Click here for the Full Stretton Group Paper on Fire in Water Catchments