With Lake Eildon at 97 per cent full and no sign of El Niño showing up anytime soon, he reckons Goulburn-Murray Water is sailing close to the wind.
That’s the way I like it, of course. Sailing close to the wind is a fine way for a dog to live — taking chances and injecting a measure of risk into everyday life.
Let’s face it, life is risky: we’re not going to get out of it alive.
Last time the river was up, I nearly didn’t. That big kangaroo took a piece out of me while I was trying to teach him a lesson. The Boss says I miscalculated and he reckons G-MW might be being lured in with a false sense of security, in much the same way.
Back at the start of June, Eildon was sitting at 93 per cent — a level The Boss thinks is more than enough at the start of winter. After all, winter and a good spring snowmelt can lift Eildon by up to 30 per cent — and all that water has to go somewhere.
Of course, the weather bureau had been predicting the end of the multi-year La Niña event all summer and finally announced the end of La Niña in mid-March. It put us on “El Nino Watch” — suggesting a more likely drying period was upon us — in April.
As always, the bureau adds lots of qualifying comments so it can’t be blamed if predictions go awry. At the moment, the ENSO — the El Niño Southern Oscillation — has moved from El Nino Watch to El Nino Alert.
There are all sorts of indicators that get the bureau to this point. There’s the SOI — the Southern Oscillation Index; the IOD — the Indian Ocean Dipole; the SAM — the Southern Annular Mode; the MJO — the Madden-Julian Oscillation; and then there’s the Global SSTs — the global sea surface temperatures.
And even then, when all of these indicators suggest an El Niño drying event is on its way, the El Niño only happens 70 per cent of the time.
But G-MW backed it in and, at the start of one of the wetter Junes on record, kept Eildon outflows down to a thousand megalitres a day to bring the lake right up to 97 per cent, which it reached before mid-month. Flows suddenly increased to 12,000ML a day but now they’ve backed off to 10,000. It’s the sort of risky punting of which I approve.
The Boss isn’t so sure. He reckons one big rain event like in October last year and we’re under water again, with no help from the Eildon storage. As it is, we’ve had 20,000ML a day coming under the Murchison bridge.
It’s not all bad, I keep telling him. Apart from that big kanga, the October flood concentrated a lot of entertainment around the house — wombats, hares and rabbits, foxes and wallabies all looking for a patch of dry ground. It presented me with the kind of upper hand I can exploit.
“You don’t have to pay the bills, General,” he points out. “A big flood causes a lot of pain and expense and there’s plenty of nervous people along the river.”
He says G-MW is focused mainly on protecting the interests of irrigators, with flood mitigation being a secondary priority. But a lot of irrigators also live along the river. “We’re the same people, General. The same people.” Woof!
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