Picked up Arundhati Roy’s : The Cost of Living at Lifeline Bookfest. Published in 1999. An amazing gem on building huge dams.
She writes of the problems of big dams in general but the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River in Maharashtra province in western India in particular.
It completely predicts the problems with Wivenhoe and much more.
Here is a quote:
“The thing about multi-purpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is that their ‘purposes’ (irrigation power production and flood-control) conflict with one another. Flood control requires you to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an anticipated surfeit of water. And if there’s no surfeit you’re left with an empty dam. And this defeats the purpose of irrigation which is to store the monsoon water. And if you take into account the power needed to pump water through its vast network of irrigation canals the Sardar Sarovar Projects will end up consuming more electicity than they produce.”
This is a tiny book(114 little pages each packing a huge punch). It should be widely read in SE QLD at this time.