We need to be ready before luck runs out

It's not over until the fire authorities say it's over, of course - that much was proven during an unusually hot March last year when the enormous Hill End area blaze broke out - but the end of February will mark a psychological boundary, if nothing else.

The return of regular single-digit minimums won't be far away now and thirsty local gardens won't require quite as much help from the hose.

Bathurst has been riding a long run of luck with its water ever since the summer of 2019-2020, when a gradual descent for the Chifley Dam supply suddenly started to accelerate.

Various milestones at the dam have been marked since - two consecutive years at capacity, three consecutive years at capacity - as a catchment that couldn't catch a break during the long drought now never seems to dry out.

But, of course, it will dry out at some stage.

That is one of the reasons why the slow progress on our long-talked-about stormwater harvesting scheme has been such a frustration.

While council, understandably, has been keen to highlight the completion of the upgrade to Winburndale Dam to the north-east of the city, the stormwater scheme that was meant to help future-proof our population remains far from the finish line.

A city with a dam that can't seem to get below 100 per cent is not going to need to dip into its stormwater any time soon, of course.

But the whole point of the project was to have it ready well before the bad times came again; to have the city comfortably prepared for the next drought rather than scrambling to deal with it once it became obvious it had arrived.

We didn't expect a massive bushfire in the Hill End region in March last year and we didn't expect, after a number of years of drought, for Chifley Dam to suddenly fill and stay filled.

That's the point: we don't know what to expect. But we do know how to prepare.

If we want to keep welcoming new residents and building new houses, we're going to need to make sure we've got the water to accommodate them.

The stormwater harvesting scheme is meant to be part of that. But while it remains unfinished, it's not.