Weekend Sunrise report on Hawkesbury Flood forum – 21st August 2022
Channel: Councillor Nathan Zamprogno
Date: 21/08/2022

Recently I attended the community forum held by the Hawkesbury Community Alliance about flood mitigation. Five of your Hawkesbury Councillors attended (myself and Clrs Sheather, Lyons-Buckett, Wheeler and Dogramaci), and Robyn Preston MP, the Member for Hawkesbury. I am disappointed that the other Councillors were disinterested in such an important forum.

The presentation was excellent, with Professor Stuart Khan from UNSW summarising the conclusions of a number of reports and studies, some of which only recently released.

The organiser's pointed claim was that the forum was not about the debate to raise Warragamba Dam. This struck me as like hosting a debate about COVID but banning people from talking about vaccination.

Despite this, Professor Khan made a solid argument for *both* raising the dam as a matter of urgency, *and* lowering the water storage level in times of likely intense rainfall.

There were of course gaps in the presentation. The Professor only spoke of the capital costs of augmenting our non-rainfall sources of drinking water, but he made no mention of the recurrent costs of running energy-hungry desalination plants which may add $200 or more to the water bills of all Sydneysiders if implemented.

Worse, I felt he painted a picture of false hope. Although I support lowering the water storage level of the dam, and it can be done sooner than raising the wall, the difference it would make to the height of a 2021 or 2022-level flood is very modest indeed - much less than a meter. Any reduction having the same mitigating effect as raising the wall would effectively gut Sydney's drinking water supply and put us in a dreadful position when the next drought comes, and surely another drought is as much an inevitability as another flood – remember climate change will give us greater *variability* of weather. We need to mitigate against both possibilities.

I was grateful to the organisers for hosting the forum. Let's have another in a months time with hydrologists and engineers from Sydney Water about raising the dam.