I WRITE in regard to the article “No worries” published in the Western Advocate on January 12.
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I note that the article was in relation to the approval of a 312-lot residential subdivision off Limekilns Road, Kelso.
This generated a number of comments from residents in relation to the impact of this growth of Bathurst.
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It may be of interest to the community that three other subdivisions, directly alongside and adjacent to the 312 lots approved, have been approved by council in the past year and all three are nearing completion:
- Council’s own development on Sunnybright Estate, stage one, which is of 150 lots, with another 100 lots in stage two.
- A 106-lot development at 240 Limekilns Road.
- A 45-lot development at 186 Limekilns Road.
That’s 713 lots altogether, equating to around 3000 more people, which is an increase of 7.5 per cent on the current Bathurst population, just from the development of these four subdivisions in Kelso.
I understand that other developments are planned for Bathurst.
Bathurst’s growth is bound to stretch current infrastructure and it would appear that water will be one of them.
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The council, by the article, is adamant that there is enough water available in the current system to cope with this growth.
But is that opinion on the basis of continuing the water restrictions permanently, or relying on the weather pattern changing in the near future?
A current councillor has forecast the dam level will be down to 30 per cent if there is no rain relief to the storage in the next year.
Forecasting that Bathurst will have enough water for present and future population, in my opinion, can only be a hopeful guess and one that is surely not good enough to plan for future growth.
We need a definite positive solution which will cater for the population growth without having to restrict water supplies to residents who spend, and have spent, large amounts of money in landscaping their properties.
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A short-term solution could be to provide another treatment plant to the water from Winburndale Dam and make it available for public consumption, instead of just for public gardens and playing fields. Raising the Chifley Dam wall will provide more water, but only if the rainfall is there to fill it.
There is another option which would take away such guesswork and save a lot of water loss due to evaporation: a pipeline from Warragamba Dam to Chifley Dam.
Water could be pumped to the latter dam when required.
Warragamba Dam is in a far more rain dependent catchment and any depreciation of water in the Sydney water supply, due to the service to Chifley Dam, can be made up by using the desalination plant at Kurnell (currently in standby mode), which is capable of producing 240 million litres per day.
Council states current Bathurst consumption is 19 million litres per day – a fraction of what is available from the desalination plant.
The distance from Warragamba Dam to Chifley Dam is approximately 75 kilometres.
In the UK, the Greater City of Manchester, population four million, has relied on the water from Lake Thirlmere in the Lake District since 1894, delivered by an underground concrete aqueduct over a distance of 154 kilometres.
The water would need to be pumped to Chifley Dam, however, such pumps are available.
I note that in other developments in our area, Regis Resources Limited, the company establishing a new gold mine near Blayney, intends to construct an underground pipeline 80 kilometres in length to bring water from Springvale near Lithgow to the new mine.
In regard to the future growth of our city, infrastructure should be in place before population growth, to prevent the sort of restrictions we are observing now.