The recent widespread rain has helped to fill dams on properties and revive local gardens but it hasn’t made a significant difference to our town water storages.
Cobar Shire Council’s general manager Peter Vlatko said the amount of rain recorded across the shire, and across the region, was patchy.
“Unfortunately the bulk of the rain didn’t fall in the right catchment area.
“Some people got rain and some didn’t and what we got is not enough to relieve the drought potential and stop Burrendong going dry,” Mr Vlatko told The Cobar Weekly.
He said Burrendong Dam received some inflows (it was sitting at two per cent capacity yesterday, up from 1.4 per cent last week) and we also received some rain in the local catchment.
“In terms of our local storages, the water that we received would last us only about a day, unfortunately,” Mr Vlatko said.
He said Cobar residents needed to remain vigilant about saving water.
“The current trend of our community and our mines is that we are reducing our usage which is great,” Mr Vlatko said.
“Both mines are doing a fantastic job of reducing their water usage in the short term so we can store as much water as we can.”
Mr Vlatko said council recently upgraded their water restrictions policy to ban the installation of any new pools and the laying of new turf.
“This is not the right time to be putting a pool in when Cobar can’t give you the water to fill it,” he said.
The average backyard Australian pool holds about 40,000 to 50,000 litres of water.
Mr Vlatko said putting in new turf is not an option in Cobar as it could not be kept alive under the current odds and evens water restrictions.
He said Council’s focus at this stage is to continue to conserve water and hope that we get more follow-up rain.
