SOUTHERN Rural Water has denied claims they have for nine years fabricated data for a river monitoring station near Sale that doesn't exist.
But the revelation that the station doesn't exist has prompted calls from conservationists for the water authority to finally install the station.
Southern Rural Water groundwater and rivers manager Craig Parker recently confirmed a gauging station earmarked for near the Swing Bridge had never been installed.
This is despite $70,000 being set aside for the installation of the station in 2000.
Under the Water Act 1989, water authorities are required to maintain gauging stations at designated points to monitor freshwater river flows.
If the station existed, it would be the last gauging station on the Thomson and Latrobe river system before flowing into the Gippsland Lakes.
Southern Rural Water has been "calculating'' river flow readings from the phantom station since 2000 by using readings from monitoring stations at Kilmany South and Bundalaguah, minus entitlements for irrigation and industry.
Southern Rural Water groundwater and rivers manager Craig Parker said this was the best method for calculating river flows at the Swing Bridge.
"All authorities involved have agreed that this is the best way to measure the flows,'' he said.
"The Swing Bridge is a tidal site. Any monitoring equipment is not able to distinguish tidal flows from river flows, making the data useless for river monitoring.''
But former general manager of Lake Wellington Rivers Authority, Ross Scott, said the technology to distinguish tidal and river flows had been available for years and Southern Rural Water needed to stop making excuses.
"The technology has been there for decades and it's getting better yearly,'' he said.
"The money is also there to put it in ... they just don't want to put it at that site.''
Mr Scott said using the figures from the Bundalaguah and Kilmany South sites to get a supposed reading from the Swing Bridge site was flawed.
He believed flows guaranteed under the bulk entitlements at those gauging stations were not being met.
Mr Scott said there were no controls on extractions, both legal and illegal, between the two stations and the Swing Bridge and he believed water was "being nicked''.
"The controls in place at these two upstream sites are not adequate ... they do not guarantee the flows are getting into the lakes as well as they should,'' he said.
Mr Parker rejected Mr Scott's claims.
"Extractions are controlled by licenses and enforced by meter reading and regular on-ground inspections,'' he said.
"With the Latrobe River typically flowing in excess of 300 megalitres per day, an illegal extraction would not be picked up by monitoring equipment anyway, because it is a small percentage of the flow, and because water moves in and out of the surrounding environment.
"Illegal extractions are detected by meter reading, SRW inspectors, and by community reporting.''
Email a friend
Favourites
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Digg
StumbleUpon
MySpace
Reddit
Newsvine
LinkedIn
Kwoff
Twitter