Environmental Watering – object achieved!
Dual leaf Combination Gates up to 6.5m high x 2m wide, along with Segmented Stopboard structures were designed, manufactured and installed for five sites within Victoria’s iconic Hattah Lakes.
Multi-leaf gates provide the benefit of combining overshot flow regulation and undershot water drainage with the ability to completely remove all gates from the water way for unobstructed flow.
The Hattah Lakes icon site includes over 20 semi-permanent freshwater lakes. The site forms part of the 48,000 hectare Hattah–Kulkyne National Park. The lakes support river red gum communities and a variety of native plants and animals. They are also important breeding places for waterbirds.AWMA’s dual leaf Combination Gates will be operated using the AWMA Hydraulic Power Pack (HPP). Due to the number of gates to be managed and geographical isolation of the sites, incorporation of AWMA’s HPP provides significant savings in energy, infrastructure and investment.
Three new regulators and three levees have been constructed to retain environmental water within the lakes and surrounding floodplain. An existing regulator has been refurbished to provide some flexibility in management of smaller volumes of water in the most southern lakes.
The infrastructure will allow restoration of a more natural flooding regime to the Hattah Lakes, with small floods provided every 2 to 3 years and larger floods every 8 years (when water is available). This will restore the role of the lakes as a drought refuge for waterbirds and other wetland-dependent species, provide important breeding habitat for waterbirds and support threatened flora and fauna species.
The vision for Hattah Lakes is to preserve and where possible enhance the biodiversity values of Hattah Lakes and to restore healthy examples of all original wetland and floodplain communities. Ecological objectives for the icon site are to:
- restore a mosaic of healthy wetland and floodplain communities to maintain the ecological character of the Ramsar site
- maintain high quality habitat for native fish in wetlands and support successful breeding events
- provide feeding and breeding habitat for a range of waterbird species
- provide conditions for successful breeding of colonial nesters at least twice every ten years.
A revised environmental water management plan has been developed, based on updated scientific information concerning the icon site. The revised plan includes detailed ecological objectives for the site based on eight years of knowledge gained from the delivery of environmental water, monitoring results, modelling, consultation and scientific research. This enables a clearer, more effective, evaluation of environmental responses to environmental water delivery.
For more information
Client: Comdain Civil
Asset Owner: Goulburn-Murray Water
Project Partners:
- Mallee Catchment Management Authority
- Department of Sustainability and Environment
- Murray-Darling Basin Authority
- Goulburn-Murray Water and Parks Victoria
- MDBA Hattah Lakes program and information
