Memarhs on the Meport of the Water Commission. 61 



Another and very serious objection to the scheme is that it 

 provides no storage on the line of supply. The consequence of 

 this would be that flood waters could only be very partially 

 impounded. In this country where heavy floods alternate with 

 prolonged droughts, our aim should be to detain in the wet 

 weather as much water as we may want in the dry, and only to 

 allow that to escape which we wish to get rid of. But under the 

 proposed scheme the capacity for impounding water is limited. 

 The Commissioners propose to draw ofl" no water at all unless 

 the river is running at the rate of 10,000,000 gaUons per diem, 

 as that amount is required for the settlers lower down the river 

 and the conduit is oaly to be constructed to carry 80,000,000 

 gallons. 1 leave out of sight the question as to whether the 

 settlers will be contented with the million gallons, especially in 

 dry weather or whether they wiJl claim more, or claim compensa- 

 tion. Some of the water, therefore, they must give away — some 

 they must allow to go to waste. It is only what is intermediate 

 between these two limits^between what they must give and what 

 they must lose — that they can secure. In a dry period, therefore, 

 when the reservoir might urgently require replenishing, if there 

 were^only occasional showers that did not set the river running 

 at a greater rate that 10,000,000 gallons per day, none could be 

 impounded for the use of the city ; and we often have a succession 

 of light rains at short intervals. On the other hand if heavy 

 rain should hapren to fall continuously for several days, the 

 surplus water could not be sent into the reservoir, even though it 

 were half empty, because the conduit could not deliver more 

 than 80,000,000 gallons a day. It would require the conduit to 

 to be running at its full capacity for 125 days to fill the reservoir 

 in the first instance, and if we suppose only the upper 25 feet of 

 water to be drawn oflT after a long drought, it would require the 

 conduit to be running at its full capacity for 87 days to refill the 

 reservoir. But our heavy rainfalls are generally of short dura- 

 tion, and after a prolonged drought it would probably require a 

 considerable lapse of time before we could average 87 days of 

 maximum delivery. The Commissioners' tables show that, in the 

 year of their observations, the conduit would only have been 

 running full for 90 days. 



The total quantity that could have been run into the reservoir 

 in the year would be 12,000 million gallons. But the total 

 estimated rainfall on the watershed of the Cataract and the 

 Nepean was 227,280 millions of gallons, and the quantity actually 

 measured as passing down the river was 87,688 millions of 

 gallons. 



The cost of the proposed works I do not enter into but the 

 Commissioners themselves estimated it at little less than a million 



