TOO MUCH DAM INFORMATION

So although I haven't mentioned it here lately, I have kept going 
with my explorations of the dams and reservoirs in my corner of 
Australia. The Wurdee Boluc reservoir, although the largest in 
capacity and area, is pretty much just a big lake in the middle of 
grasland. Apparantly it started as a swamp and the banks were built 
up over the years, most recently with a large-scale addition in the 
90s that almost doubled its capacity. It's mainly a storage 
reservoir for water piped down from the West Barwon reservoir that 
I looked at first. Given that it's fairly shallow compared to most 
other reservoirs, it makes me wonder how much water must be lost 
from it over summer due to evaporation. It's over 90% full at the 
moment though, so I guess that won't matter much for this year.

One interesting feature was an adjacent water treatment plant. 
Walking towards it along the rim of the embankment I came upon a 
no-entry sign where the red had all faded away, so I decided to 
interpret that as a "yes-entry" sign and continued on regardless. 
As it happened, it worked out OK and I think I was only spotted by 
some mobs of kangaroos who seem to enjoy the unused areas of land 
around the perimeter of the reservoir. There was a good view of the 
treatment plant, consisting expectedly of many tanks for forcing 
water through all sorts of magical substances that I later found 
described on the 2008 version of the Barwon Water website. Also a 
significant array of solar panels. It seems that other people are 
mainly interested in the reservoir for fishing, with quite a few 
rods in action around the parts that didn't have "yes-entry" signs 
warning people off.

The Bostock Reservoir, right next to the town of Ballan and not far 
from the Lal Lal reservoir that I also saw earlier, was much more 
scenic, and also popular for fishing. This in spite of the fact 
that my map suggested that the road ended about 100m short of it 
and was only accesed via a walking track. It also had the location 
of the adjacent toilet block (a frequent feature of these places - 
presumably to dissuade people from a particular alternative) marked 
at what turned out to be a telephone exchange in a paddock half-way 
along the road there. Also unmarked was the Ballan Mineral Spring - 
a failed tourist attraction that the Ballan 'improvement society' 
attempted to make notable in the 1920s, and which has apparantly 
persisted in some borderline state of maintenance ever since. Quite 
a pretty place amongst the bush and the tree-battered picnic 
benches, though the noise from the nearby freeway was prominent in 
the soundscape. The water was... interesting. Immediately most 
notable for a rusty taste of iron, reminicient of old park water 
fountains with rusty pipes, it wasn't too surprising that nobody 
else was there to taste it. It did have a distint and vagely 
pleasurable tang to it which kept me coming back for more though, 
and together one can start to believe some of the health claims on 
a nearby sign, in spite of a sticker at the bottom noting that the 
relevent authority does not guarantee the water's safety (it hasn't 
had all those minerals 'treated' out, I suppose).

A few cars drove past while I was there and I was wondering where 
they could be going if the road ended a short way on. It turns out 
it just comes up to a gate, which was open, and in fact the quality 
of the gravel road improved significantly after that point. Not 
entirely sure whether some worker had just left the gate open, I 
ploughed on and discovered a large carpark and well-equipped picnic 
area right at the bank of the reservoir. The reservoir was at full 
capacity so the water ran right up to the pine and gumtree lined 
edges of its meandering banks. Quite a few nice views to 
photograph, but again most people seemed to be there for the 
fishing. I also caught my first spillway spiling, which was quite a 
sight. It's a long and gradual concrete one, but nevertheless 
ending in a sudden drop-off into a rough channel that disapears 
around a corner into bush and pine-plantation. The channel was 
erroded away significantly, such that I was careful where I walked 
near the edge. Most facinating was how the water towards the end of 
the concrete part of the spillway was getting underneath the thick, 
2m+ long, rectangular slabs, and then pushing its way up again 
further down. One whole slab had actually been lifted out and 
pushed intact onto the rocks at the end, leaving a larger hole for 
water to gush into before the end and then squeeze out in all sorts 
of places. I found it to be quite a facinating display of the force 
of water, though it's possibly an embarrasement to the dam 
engineers.

I cut my visit a little short because I wanted to also get to the 
Korweinguboora reservoir that's a little ways further north. For 
the sake of curiosity and keeping off busy roads, I chose to go via 
the out-of-the way little town of Blakeville, burried in the middle 
of a forest and presumably once sustained by logging. Down the end 
of an old twisty little road, it greets you with a small mix of 
buildings, particularly some old houses almost completely fallen 
down, accompanied by old rusting cars and heavy machinery dating 
from the 70s at the latest. An old unpainted wooden hall had one 
sign on a post out the front announcing the place "Blakeville". I 
think of all the towns I've been to it's the one that so far most 
reminds me of 'Paris" from the movie The Cars That Ate Paris - some 
forgotten little town in the bush where nobody goes and you can 
imagine the locals getting up to anything. I see now that it 
doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, which seems appropriate.

But from there I didn't quite make it to the next reservoir because 
shortly before I reached it there was a sudden downpour of heavy 
rain and besides not being able to see the road signs, I figured if 
I tried to go there in that weather I was likely to end up part 
_of_ the the reservoir, so I turned back and headed for home.

Since then I've made an effort to dig up all the information I 
could about local reservoir locations. There is an industry group 
for dam operators in Australia called ANCOLD which conveniently 
maintains a list, including location coordinates, which can be 
downloaded from their website (though, less helpfully for me, only 
in Excel format). I managed to plot that on some online mapping 
websites (ArcGIS and umap.openstreetmap.fr), but it turns out the 
database is missing quite a few dams for some reason. The most 
reliable method seems to be to work through all the different water 
authority websites and find the map they all seem to have 
_somewhere_ describing the reservoirs that they manage. Just in 
case some other Victorian wants to follow in my footsteps, I've 
assembled all the maps that I collected here:
gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/collected_files/dams/maps/

The OpenStreetMap map is also here, just showing ANCOLD dams in 
Victoria because it didn't like me trying to add the entries for 
the whole of Australia:
http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ancold-dams-victoria-australia_808969

There's an index of Victorian water authority websites here:
https://vicwater.org.au/about-us/our-members/

And the ANCOLD dams spreadsheet is at the bottom of this page:
https://www.ancold.org.au/?page_id=24
Or here including CSV and HTML versions:
gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/collected_files/dams/

There's also an ICOLD World Register of Dams, which the ANCOLD data 
is part of, but they want money before letting you view that:
https://www.icold-cigb.org/GB/world_register/world_register_of_dams.asp

I find it quite enlightening to look at all the engineering that 
goes into supplying towns with water. It's quite a high level of 
skill and sheer effort that most people don't even think about, at 
least until the water starts running out. It's interesting the way 
that different reservoirs were tied to individual communities, and 
then more recently joined together into larger networks via 
mostly-unseen pipelines and channels that run all over the place. 
It's also curious how forests and plantations play such a critical 
role as cachment areas for the reservoirs, restricting their 
locations to specific environments which also happen to be 
interesting to explore for lots of other reasons.

One down side of how they're concentrated in areas though is that 
there are only so many interesting new ways to drive to them. I'm 
getting a little tired of the same old falling-apart roads around 
Meredith, for example.

Many of the ones left on my to-visit list are a bit questionable 
regarding access. The roads leading to them are marked on my best 
map as "suitable for 2WD vehicles in dry conditions", and these 
certainly aren't dry conditions at the moment, least of all around 
a place wet enough that someone's built a reservoir. So they're a 
bit too much of a risk in the Jag at the moment. Next I'll probably 
head back to the start and revisit the West Barwon Reservior, which 
has apparantly now filled up and started spilling too. Last time I 
didn't know about the West Gellibrand Reservoir just a few Km away 
from the West Barwon, so I'll also try to visit that. It's down a 
2WD-dry-weather-only road as well, but there's a paved road to a 
waterfall a few hundred meters away so I think I can park there and 
walk the rest of the way. I'd be doing that this weekend but it's a 
long weekend for the footy grand final (which I couldn't care less 
about), made even longer because Thursday became a holiday in 
memorial of the death of Queen Elizabeth II (which I do find quite 
interesting - these sentiments are possibly the opposite of the 
popular mood), which means I don't want to travel on the roads 
while all the holiday makers are out in force. (So instead I'm just 
babbling at you instead of actually doing something productive).

Then the main cluster left on this side of the state, ignoring 
Melbourne ones because they're too close to busy roads, will be 
around the Grampians, managed by GWM Water. I've worked out one 
route through there that covers five on the one trip, including the 
massive Rocklands Reservoir. But I do worry that might be a few to 
many dams for the one day. I might be sick of damn dams after all 
that!

It's frustratng that I really like driving around in the Jag, but a 
4x4 vehicle set up for camping would be a lot more flexible for 
this sort of thing. I did see a local ad for a Land Rover that had 
been very nicely converted for camping, with a slide-out kitchen 
and pop-top sleeping area. If I can talk them down about $60,000 
then it might be in my price range. :)

 - The Free Thinker

PS. I don't actually drink water from any of these reservoirs. 
Where I live you have to manage your own water cachments, storage, 
and pipelines. Or in other words, use a tank and collect the stuff 
from your roof - it falls down from the sky, don't you know?