NSW hopes to save water in Menindee Lakes

Posted February 08, 2013 08:30:24

The NSW Office of Water is seeking money from the Federal Government to save water in the Menindee Lakes.

Late last year the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was passed into law after the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced $1.7 billion more for infrastructure works in the system.

NSW Water Commissioner David Harriss says the state government will present two options to improve water use in the lakes.

He says both would involve Lake Menindee being the focus of water storage and reducing the reliance on the smaller lakes for irrigators.

"We've done a whole lot of preliminary costings and some of the sort of figures we're looking for the infrastructure works is in excess of $100 million," he said.

"We're going to go through the process of identifying the works, doing proper detailed design and then getting realistic assessments of the potentials costs."

He says the outlet capacity of Lake Menindee could be enlarged so orders from South Australia could be met without having to also draw-down the smaller lakes in the system.

Or he says a bank could be built between Lake Menindee and Lake Cawndilla where the water can't be accessed easily.

"That would enable the smaller inflows that you get over the course of any period to be stored preferentially in Lake Menindee without having to spread right across Lake Cawndilla," he said.

"That would mean you would have better access to that water because once it's in Lake Cawndilla you have very little options for it other than going down the Anabranch."

A local water expert says Lake Cawndilla must be better more efficiently.

Stan Dineen says a better option would be to build better channels for water to leave Lake Cawndilla and return to the Darling River.

"There's 200,000 megalitres there that can't be accessed, and we should be able to access that," he said.

"You could almost decommission Lake Cawndilla. That means we would reduce the Menindee storages by about a third."

Topics: water-management, water-supply, murray-darling-basin, environment, irrigation, rivers, menindee-2879