| Coliban under fire for water breach |
| By Anthony Radford
Coliban
THE book should be thrown at Coliban Water for illegally taking 30 megalitres of water from Lake Eppalock, according to a local politician.
The Bendigo Weekly discovered on Tuesday that 30 megalitres of water was pumped from the lake to top up Heathcote’s water supply late last month.
That amount is enough to supply the town for about a month.
Coliban’s allocation from Lake Eppalock ran out about one month earlier.
The Weekly can reveal Heathcote will be connected to Bendigo’s water supply in an attempt to stop the small town running dry by April.
Meanwhile, Shepparton-based Liberal Party member for the Northern Region Wendy Lovell said Coliban should receive the toughest penalty available for taking the water.
“Coliban Water should receive the heftiest penalties possible because they are not above the law,” she said.
“Goulburn Murray Water chairman Don Cummins said at a recent meeting that Coliban Water will be treated like any other customer.
“GMW would not let an irrigator use the excuse that ‘whoops, we used a bit too much’.
“The water should also be re-paid before the end of the next irrigation season.”
Coliban Water acting chief executive Neil Burns put the event down to a simple mistake.
“One of our operators got a bit over zealous and thought he would get a bit of extra water,” he said. “It was a communications glitch from our perspective. We didn’t communicate right down the line.
“He turned the pump on and when it was discovered, it was turned off. It ran for about a week.” GMW Planning and Environment executive director Alex Marshall said both authorities were talking about what to do.
“We notified them in writing when their allocation had been used up,” he said.
“We are in discussions with them as to what they are going to do about it.
“Basically, we will have to do a transfer when water becomes available.
“It is not a significant error in the scheme of things but it shouldn’t have happened.”
Heathcote gets all its supply from Lake Eppalock, and with Coliban Water using up all its allocation from the lake, is facing running out of water by April.
Mr Burns said a small pipeline would be built to stop that happening.
“It is going to put more load on the Coliban system, but we have a capacity to connect the Eppalock pipeline which comes to Bendigo and the Heathcote pipeline (near Lake Eppalock) that goes to Heathcote,” he said.
“They are about 100 metres apart. We are going to connect the two.
“We can back-feed water from Sandhurst Reservoir down the pipeline and run it through (the new pipe) and run it to Heathcote. The back up for Heathcote will be to actually supply water from Sandhurst Reservoir.”
Mr Burns said the pipeline was the only real option.
“For Heathcote that is the only option we have got, other than trucking it,” he said.
“We would still be taking the water from the same spot anyway. “It is something we have contemplated for some time. It has some benefits to us as a back-up to the pump system back there.
“We might just run it into the treatment plant.”
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