TOO MUCH DAM INFORMATION
So although I haven't mentioned it here lately, I have kept going
with my explorations of the dams and reservoirs in my corner of
Australia. The Wurdee Boluc reservoir, although the largest in
capacity and area, is pretty much just a big lake in the middle of
grasland. Apparantly it started as a swamp and the banks were built
up over the years, most recently with a large-scale addition in the
90s that almost doubled its capacity. It's mainly a storage
reservoir for water piped down from the West Barwon reservoir that
I looked at first. Given that it's fairly shallow compared to most
other reservoirs, it makes me wonder how much water must be lost
from it over summer due to evaporation. It's over 90% full at the
moment though, so I guess that won't matter much for this year.
One interesting feature was an adjacent water treatment plant.
Walking towards it along the rim of the embankment I came upon a
no-entry sign where the red had all faded away, so I decided to
interpret that as a "yes-entry" sign and continued on regardless.
As it happened, it worked out OK and I think I was only spotted by
some mobs of kangaroos who seem to enjoy the unused areas of land
around the perimeter of the reservoir. There was a good view of the
treatment plant, consisting expectedly of many tanks for forcing
water through all sorts of magical substances that I later found
described on the 2008 version of the Barwon Water website. Also a
significant array of solar panels. It seems that other people are
mainly interested in the reservoir for fishing, with quite a few
rods in action around the parts that didn't have "yes-entry" signs
warning people off.
The Bostock Reservoir, right next to the town of Ballan and not far
from the Lal Lal reservoir that I also saw earlier, was much more
scenic, and also popular for fishing. This in spite of the fact
that my map suggested that the road ended about 100m short of it
and was only accesed via a walking track. It also had the location
of the adjacent toilet block (a frequent feature of these places -
presumably to dissuade people from a particular alternative) marked
at what turned out to be a telephone exchange in a paddock half-way
along the road there. Also unmarked was the Ballan Mineral Spring -
a failed tourist attraction that the Ballan 'improvement society'
attempted to make notable in the 1920s, and which has apparantly
persisted in some borderline state of maintenance ever since. Quite
a pretty place amongst the bush and the tree-battered picnic
benches, though the noise from the nearby freeway was prominent in
the soundscape. The water was... interesting. Immediately most
notable for a rusty taste of iron, reminicient of old park water
fountains with rusty pipes, it wasn't too surprising that nobody
else was there to taste it. It did have a distint and vagely
pleasurable tang to it which kept me coming back for more though,
and together one can start to believe some of the health claims on
a nearby sign, in spite of a sticker at the bottom noting that the
relevent authority does not guarantee the water's safety (it hasn't
had all those minerals 'treated' out, I suppose).
A few cars drove past while I was there and I was wondering where
they could be going if the road ended a short way on. It turns out
it just comes up to a gate, which was open, and in fact the quality
of the gravel road improved significantly after that point. Not
entirely sure whether some worker had just left the gate open, I
ploughed on and discovered a large carpark and well-equipped picnic
area right at the bank of the reservoir. The reservoir was at full
capacity so the water ran right up to the pine and gumtree lined
edges of its meandering banks. Quite a few nice views to
photograph, but again most people seemed to be there for the
fishing. I also caught my first spillway spiling, which was quite a
sight. It's a long and gradual concrete one, but nevertheless
ending in a sudden drop-off into a rough channel that disapears
around a corner into bush and pine-plantation. The channel was
erroded away significantly, such that I was careful where I walked
near the edge. Most facinating was how the water towards the end of
the concrete part of the spillway was getting underneath the thick,
2m+ long, rectangular slabs, and then pushing its way up again
further down. One whole slab had actually been lifted out and
pushed intact onto the rocks at the end, leaving a larger hole for
water to gush into before the end and then squeeze out in all sorts
of places. I found it to be quite a facinating display of the force
of water, though it's possibly an embarrasement to the dam
engineers.
I cut my visit a little short because I wanted to also get to the
Korweinguboora reservoir that's a little ways further north. For
the sake of curiosity and keeping off busy roads, I chose to go via
the out-of-the way little town of Blakeville, burried in the middle
of a forest and presumably once sustained by logging. Down the end
of an old twisty little road, it greets you with a small mix of
buildings, particularly some old houses almost completely fallen
down, accompanied by old rusting cars and heavy machinery dating
from the 70s at the latest. An old unpainted wooden hall had one
sign on a post out the front announcing the place "Blakeville". I
think of all the towns I've been to it's the one that so far most
reminds me of 'Paris" from the movie The Cars That Ate Paris - some
forgotten little town in the bush where nobody goes and you can
imagine the locals getting up to anything. I see now that it
doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, which seems appropriate.
But from there I didn't quite make it to the next reservoir because
shortly before I reached it there was a sudden downpour of heavy
rain and besides not being able to see the road signs, I figured if
I tried to go there in that weather I was likely to end up part
_of_ the the reservoir, so I turned back and headed for home.
Since then I've made an effort to dig up all the information I
could about local reservoir locations. There is an industry group
for dam operators in Australia called ANCOLD which conveniently
maintains a list, including location coordinates, which can be
downloaded from their website (though, less helpfully for me, only
in Excel format). I managed to plot that on some online mapping
websites (ArcGIS and umap.openstreetmap.fr), but it turns out the
database is missing quite a few dams for some reason. The most
reliable method seems to be to work through all the different water
authority websites and find the map they all seem to have
_somewhere_ describing the reservoirs that they manage. Just in
case some other Victorian wants to follow in my footsteps, I've
assembled all the maps that I collected here:
gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/collected_files/dams/maps/
The OpenStreetMap map is also here, just showing ANCOLD dams in
Victoria because it didn't like me trying to add the entries for
the whole of Australia:
http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ancold-dams-victoria-australia_808969
There's an index of Victorian water authority websites here:
https://vicwater.org.au/about-us/our-members/
And the ANCOLD dams spreadsheet is at the bottom of this page:
https://www.ancold.org.au/?page_id=24
Or here including CSV and HTML versions:
gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/collected_files/dams/
There's also an ICOLD World Register of Dams, which the ANCOLD data
is part of, but they want money before letting you view that:
https://www.icold-cigb.org/GB/world_register/world_register_of_dams.asp
I find it quite enlightening to look at all the engineering that
goes into supplying towns with water. It's quite a high level of
skill and sheer effort that most people don't even think about, at
least until the water starts running out. It's interesting the way
that different reservoirs were tied to individual communities, and
then more recently joined together into larger networks via
mostly-unseen pipelines and channels that run all over the place.
It's also curious how forests and plantations play such a critical
role as cachment areas for the reservoirs, restricting their
locations to specific environments which also happen to be
interesting to explore for lots of other reasons.
One down side of how they're concentrated in areas though is that
there are only so many interesting new ways to drive to them. I'm
getting a little tired of the same old falling-apart roads around
Meredith, for example.
Many of the ones left on my to-visit list are a bit questionable
regarding access. The roads leading to them are marked on my best
map as "suitable for 2WD vehicles in dry conditions", and these
certainly aren't dry conditions at the moment, least of all around
a place wet enough that someone's built a reservoir. So they're a
bit too much of a risk in the Jag at the moment. Next I'll probably
head back to the start and revisit the West Barwon Reservior, which
has apparantly now filled up and started spilling too. Last time I
didn't know about the West Gellibrand Reservoir just a few Km away
from the West Barwon, so I'll also try to visit that. It's down a
2WD-dry-weather-only road as well, but there's a paved road to a
waterfall a few hundred meters away so I think I can park there and
walk the rest of the way. I'd be doing that this weekend but it's a
long weekend for the footy grand final (which I couldn't care less
about), made even longer because Thursday became a holiday in
memorial of the death of Queen Elizabeth II (which I do find quite
interesting - these sentiments are possibly the opposite of the
popular mood), which means I don't want to travel on the roads
while all the holiday makers are out in force. (So instead I'm just
babbling at you instead of actually doing something productive).
Then the main cluster left on this side of the state, ignoring
Melbourne ones because they're too close to busy roads, will be
around the Grampians, managed by GWM Water. I've worked out one
route through there that covers five on the one trip, including the
massive Rocklands Reservoir. But I do worry that might be a few to
many dams for the one day. I might be sick of damn dams after all
that!
It's frustratng that I really like driving around in the Jag, but a
4x4 vehicle set up for camping would be a lot more flexible for
this sort of thing. I did see a local ad for a Land Rover that had
been very nicely converted for camping, with a slide-out kitchen
and pop-top sleeping area. If I can talk them down about $60,000
then it might be in my price range. :)
- The Free Thinker
PS. I don't actually drink water from any of these reservoirs.
Where I live you have to manage your own water cachments, storage,
and pipelines. Or in other words, use a tank and collect the stuff
from your roof - it falls down from the sky, don't you know?
