Drought over?

KB1971 said :

Water restrictions should stay. They will go a long way to help the longevity of out water supply.
I was talking about this to a workmate this morning & we both grew up on tank water & cannot believe the amount of water wastage in Canberra.

I also grew up on tank water and thoroughly agree. Keep the restrictions.

Why are we still on water restrictions? Let’s see… if you keep water restrictions going and keep saying water will always be scarce (even though we have more water in our dams than I can remember in more than 40 years) then you can keep the prices high. ACTEW is a corporation who are making a LOT of money out of water restrictions.

The drought is over – you’ve all been brainwashed by a campaign including expensive advertising (paid for by your taxes) into believing it will never end.

This has been discussed before, but we will always have water restrictions. The government has already passed a bill on permanent water conservation measures (read restrictions), more or less in line with stage 1 of old. The question though is if we have our dams at 80% capacity why are we not on these now instead of stage 2?

This could well be the end of the current drought. Of course, we have no real idea as to when the next drought might start, so it’s definitely time to have a think about how to make sure our nearly full dams are put to best use.

Keeping at least basic water restrictions has to be part of the plan.

Mathman said :

my rain guage has just clocked up 614mm for the year so far.

That’s a good rain gauge.. mine holds only 50mm

tommy said :

Hopefully the water prices will go down too…

Apparently that’s not how it works, in essence ACTEW are guaranteed a certain amount of income by the regulator, if they sell less the price moves up, if they sell more, the price moves down.

Either way we are screwed…

Can’t remember the last time the 128km and 256km radars were a solid blue blob.

Canberra’s average rainfall is 629mm and my rain guage has just clocked up 614mm for the year so far.

Of interest to weather watchers is that we are currently experiencing a very low barometric pressure of 990mb and still falling. This is the one of the lowest I have seen in nearly 10 years of watching.

I don’t think we should get rid of water restrictions at all. Probably the only good thing to come out of the ten year drought was the emphasis on water being a finite resource and that we shouldn’t take it for granted. All of that education and emphasis on the proper use of water that we had during stage 4 and 5 water restrictions should not be allowed to simply disappear. I really do think water restrictions in some form should stay in place to prevent wastage. Surely we don’t want to go back to the days of people spending long periods hosing down their driveways and having all that water disappearing down the drain.

Hopefully the water prices will go down too…