Paperlinx Green Shareholders' Group
Water Quality
Rainstorms wash nutrients, organic material and silt from the hills into streams, rivers, and ultimately, the Gippsland Lakes.
The Gippsland Lakes Environmental Audit, CSIRO, October 1998 was commissioned to consider causes and remedies for Toxic Algal Blooms in the Lakes in 1977.
"The only long term solution is to markedly reduce the nutrient loads from the Latrobe system by both restoring the catchment to a more sustainable land use and by replacing riparian vegetation and reducing erosion." (p. ii)
(The Thomson River was included in this definition of the 'Latrobe system'.)
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The dirty water affects the creatures living in it, just as dirty air affects us. It stops the penetration of sunlight needed by water plants. The deposited silt affects plant growth and the invertebrates (little beasties and insect larvae) that live in the stream. These in turn affect the supply of food for fish, and thence platypus, waterbirds and fishermen. Here we see logging carried out to the stream edge, no riparian buffer or filter zone having been left, debris pushed into the creek, and silt washed down the slope to the stream by subsequent rain. Agriculture adds the greatest nutrient loads to the rivers, but erosion resulting from poor logging practice adds to the load. Coarser silts carried out of logging coupes tend to settle where streams slow down, changing the bed and characteristics of the streams in these areas.
Photo Strzeleckis: Jeeralang Creek |
The Gippsland Lakes.
The increased nutrients carried with the finer silt contribute to toxic algal blooms in the rivers and the Gippsland lakes when the water temperature increases in summer.
These blooms severely affect those who live by the rivers and lakes, and have a major impact upon the economics of tourism.
The concentration of industry, population and agriculture in the Latrobe Valley adds to poor quality of the water in the lower reaches of the Latrobe River, and so Lake Wellington, which it feeds.
The Gippsland Lakes have been closed to swimming and fishing for parts of the last two summers because of toxic algae resulting from excess nutrients and inadequate water flows.
Already, in the spring of 1999 there are high levels of chlorophyl in the Lakes which presages toxic blooms again this summer.
The toxic algal blooms of the Gippsland Lakes have many factors which contribute to them, intensive agriculture in the irrigation areas being the greatest. Sediment and nutrient runoff from logging adds to them.
- Residents have to tolerate the smell.
- Tourists are deterred from visiting, stopping, and spending.
- Any fish caught in the affected lakes should not be eaten.
- School camps, such as Wesley College's Camp Mallana, have to be closed at those times because the children cannot be risked in the water.
Water Catchments.
Clearfell logging is carried out in the catchments of the Morwell River, Traralgon Creek, Upper Thomson River.
Clearfell logging has now moved into the forests on the South West slopes of the Baw Baws, the catchment for the Tyers River and the Moondarra Reservoir, and part of the Latrobe River catchment.
Ten years ago the Tyers River was one of the few remaning high quality rivers for aquatic life in the Latrobe catchment. (Water Victoria - A Resource Handbook, 1989, p.201)
Moondarra is the source of the water supplies to the towns of Moe, Morwell, Traralgon, Rosedale and many other small towns.
Moondarra also supplies the critical industries of the Latrobe Valley, the Power Stations, and Paperlinx.
This logging is now quite visible from the Princes Highway on a clear day. The standards maintained in this logging are crucial to the quality of the water flowing from the area.
If degradation of water quality is to be minimised any logging on slopes has to be done to high standards, with:
- very careful roading and drainage
- effective buffer and filter zones for all drainage lines (gullys)
- cessation of logging and trucking during, and for some days after wet weather
- abstinence from logging on steep slopes and erodible soils
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