Dam ‘disaster’

EMU Swamp Dam would be a social disaster for Stanthorpe and the Granite Belt, according to a fourth generation resident and affected landowner.
Rob Simcocks said Southern Downs Regional Council (SDRC) is seeking to secure an urban/irrigator water supply at Emu Swamp at Fletcher, south of Glen Aplin.
Fifteen properties surrounding the dam site are threatened by the project and valuable Severn River biodiversity likely destroyed.
Mr Simcocks said the $100 million project is projected to double the rates of average householders.
He said the original Unidel report said the proposed Emu Swamp dam wasn’t viable on any measure and councillors voted five to three to reject it.
“The former councillors chose to ignore the consultants and all the expert findings in the environmental and economic areas,” Mr Simcocks said.
“When the first Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and the Unidel Report didn’t provide answers to support the proposed dam, SDRC then chose to spend $800,000 of ratepayers’ money to fund a Supplementary EIS.”
Mr Simcocks said the Unidel Report put the reliability of the proposed water supply at 100 per cent for only six out of every 10 years.
“For those six years irrigators would have enough water through rainfall in their own dams,” he said.
“During the four years in every decade when the dam would be unreliable, growers would want the water but Emu Swamp dam would be dry. This alone should be enough to make the irrigators look elsewhere.
“It looks like the dam could be approved by the State Government on the basis that a lot of work has been done on the project. That’s dangerous considering that the consultancy has been ignored.
“Why spend money on a dam doomed to fail?
“This would be repeating earlier mistakes of over development of the Murray Darling by using information from the top of the wet cycle while ignoring the droughts.”
Mr Simcocks said the dam project appears to be driven by the irrigators, who have put up a considerable amount of seed money to see it go through.
“They’re not allowed to have new dams on their own properties because of the moratorium on new dams on the Murray Darling, so it seems they’ve found a political loophole to go onto other people’s land to get their irrigation water.
“Irrigators have offered to pay $1200 per megalitre. The real cost has been estimated at $3600 per megalitre, as stated in the Unidel Report. These estimates were costed before the current electricity price hikes, so the question is who will pay for the shortfall?”
Mr Simcocks said the dam profile was too flat – the dam would be shallow and a huge amount of water would be lost to evaporation.
He said the push by irrigators and some councillors to construct the dam was ruling out other options to ensure the future water supply for Stanthorpe residents.
Emu Swamp Dam was originally one of several measures under consideration to drought-proof the urban water supply. Irrigators then saw the potential for watering more crops.
“The time is fast approaching for irrigators to sign up and commit to paying for capital infrastructure and for paying a fair price for the water, or else back away from the project and let Stanthorpe get on with securing an urban supply,” Mr Simocks said.
“Dam supporters class other options as ‘band-aid solutions’ but the dam is a triple bypass on a corpse compared with other practical means of supplying the town with water.
“A lot of irrigators don’t even want the dam because it will allow larger farm operations into the market and upset the balance.
“The claim that the dam would be good for development of the district won’t come to pass if residents suffer steep rate increases.”
Land owned by Mr Simcocks would be inundated if the Emu Swamp dam project goes ahead.
“We need to find solutions to secure the town water supply before the next El Nino (dry) cycle,” he said.
“If the urban water supply has to go on my land at Emu Swamp and on the other 14 properties, I can accept that. It has to go somewhere and will have an impact wherever it goes.
“However, I can’t accept wealthy irrigators ‘trespassing’ on these properties on what amounts to a land and water grab.”
The council’s case for the dam is available on their website www.southerndowns.qld.gov.au.