IT'S good to see Councillor Warren Aubin leading the charge recently in reimagining how the future infrastructure of Bathurst might look like. It must be an election year.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
First it was the roundabout upgrade, which I must admit he does seem to know something about.
A few weeks later, he was calling for the relocation of the mental health facility, and giving us his opinion on raising dams and where more dams might be built.
I suspect he's been reading Stuart Pearson's column in the Western Advocate.
During the drought, 62 per cent of the time we were drawing water from the Fish River, rather than releasing it for capture from the Chifley Dam.
The first take-home lesson from that observation is that if severe drought had occurred concurrently over the Fish River catchment, Bathurst would have run out of water - I repeat, would have run out of water. As a city we were very lucky!
READ ALSO: Mayor says no to raising Chifley Dam wall
As matters stand, little has changed in preparing Bathurst for another major drought. There are few council water initiatives completed so far.
Thankfully, there are water restrictions and we are no longer in drought. Can you recall if Cr Aubin voted against water restrictions in Bathurst? Check it out.
The water that flowed down the Fish River during the drought that we relied on as a city is upstream rural stormwater.
We are planning to spend millions of dollars to harvest stormwater flowing off the city footprint as well as a yearly perpetual energy bill to pay for all the unnecessary pumping.
We can readily model the amount of stormwater that flows from our city footprint into the river downstream of Bathurst after rain.
We should be able to take that same amount of water through our existing offtake structures upstream of Bathurst. That's a common-sense solution rather than an expensive, unnecessary engineering solution.
It makes sense for Orange to harvest city stormwater, but not in Bathurst.
How do farmers capture water for their households? They install tanks. Hundreds of legal tanks.
Tanks do not feature in Bathurst Regional Council's planning at all, nor in the state government's planning.
Our underground tank filled in a matter of hours during the drought and since then there have been no water restrictions in our backyard. That tank mysteriously keeps filling, as it would have done under drought conditions with the occasional shower.
However, most of those small showers would never have made it into council's proposed water harvesting facility.
If you want to be doubly sure about the safety of water in your tank for drinking purposes, there are relatively cheap systems that will secure the safety of your water supply. Otherwise, devote the rainwater to the garden and toilets.
The other big advantage is that rainwater is delivered to your house free without any energy cost.
So what's stopping us as a city from having a tank installed in most residential homes and business enterprises?
It would go a long way towards improving Bathurst's security of water supply.
One more thing: let's test Cr Aubin's understanding of dam engineering. He is suggesting a dam be built somewhere near the confluence of the Fish and the Campbells River.
This is the location of the fabulous Macquarie and Mitchell Plains, named by George Evans in 1813 - prime agricultural land, very flat, and no gorge.
A dam at this location or nearby would be shallow, subject to a high frequency of blue-green algae blooms in summer, likely have the highest evaporation rates of any dam in the Central West because the surface area would be so huge, and cost-wise could never be built because of the high cost of linking a very long but not very high concrete wall into the underlying granite rock - not to mention the cost of land resumption from, one suspects, very angry local farmers.
Given that water remains the number one issue for Bathurst city, do you still think that Cr Aubin is worthy of your vote in September?
If fixing roundabouts was the number one issue I might just consider a vote for Cr Aubin, but ...
