Emergency rainwater harvesting in Australia

IPS: With large parts of southern and eastern Australia enduring an ongoing drought, the regional centre of Orange -- some 260 km west of the nation’s largest city, Sydney -- is developing Australia’s first scheme to harvest stormwater in order to service the town’s requirements. "It’s designed initially as an emergency response because there was no other alternative source of water for us that we could get access to quickly," says Orange council’s director of technical services, Chris Devitt.

He told IPS that while the Blackmans Swamp Creek Stormwater Harvesting project offers a "fairly quick solution" to Orange’s water crisis -- the town’s two reservoirs are currently at 40.5 percent capacity, up from a low of 27 percent in early September following seasonal rains -- the council wants the program to become a permanent fixture to help drought-proof the town. And such provisions may well be required, with Orange hitherto relying solely on surface water run-off to rural catchments.

A statement on the drought issued Nov.5 by the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre (NCC) implied that drought-like conditions will become the norm rather than the exception as the effects of climate change take hold. "The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to ten years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change," said the NCC.

Orange’s plan involves trapping water from Blackmans Swamp Creek northeast of the town, extracting and treating it before the water is eventually added to the town’s main drinking water dam….

Rain barrels, shot by Jan Tik, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License