Good outlook for water
Bright likely to remain on stage one water restrictions for the next month or two
We're getting close to finishing the redevelopment of the 7 holiday units at Grevillea Gardens in Bright. The building works & refurbishment are finished, although there's still the re-cladding of the house to do but that's a separate project for early next year.
We've recently started the landscaping and one of the major jobs involves laying about 300 square metres of instant lawn in the area at the back shown in the photo at the top of the post.
I've been worried about this because the lawn has to be thoroughly watered over the first 3 weeks to get it established. Thereafter it's supposed to be what they call "drought resistant" (we'll see!)
At the moment we're only on stage one water restrictions in Bright but under stage two watering of lawns would not be permitted. My enquiries with North East Water though have given me the confidence to go ahead and order the rolls of new turf. This is what a spokesperson told me yesterday:
"At the moment the river flow at Bright is 116 megalitres per day. IF we have no more rain that would mean stage 2 would be introduced in about a month's time. And, IF there's still no more rain, stage 4 would come in about a month later."
I think that's good news because the weather forecast is for fairly heavy rain over this weekend of about 50mm or more, particulary over the ranges. In fact it's been raining lightly since last night.
And the longer range forecast is for more rain over November, so it seems to me we're not likely to see stage two restrictions introduced until much closer to Christmas.
And by then my new turf will hopefully be well and truly established - and "drought resistant"! I'm ordering the lawn.
We're fortunate in Bright to have first off-take from the Ovens, which is one of Victoria's major rivers and supplies 15% of the entire Murray-Darling flow.
I think there's been a bit of an over-reaction to our water supply situation based on last summer's experience where the river flow got down to 2 megalitres a day and we were on stage 4 restrictions for most of the time.
That was mainly due to the dry winter & spring of 2006 and I doubt we'll see another year like that again for quite some time.
I'm confident Bright will have sufficient water to get through the dryer months in the years ahead, especially after the proposed off-river dam is built.