2011 – Management of Floods in 2010 and 2011 through Goulburn-Murray Water Dams

Stuart Richardson,Tusitha Karunaratne

Goulburn-Murray Water (G-MW) manages 16 large dams across Northern Victoria. Since January 2010 after 10 years of continuous drought a number of significant and historic maximum floods were passed through some of these dams. Although these floods are not considered extreme in a dam safety context, for downstream communities they presented very real emergency situations. There has been significant community concern regarding the impact of the floods resulting in several inquiries.

G-MW has maintained and annually reviewed comprehensive Dam Safety Emergency Management Plans (DSEP) since 1997. During 2009 G-MW began developing and documenting a systemised approach to dam’s management, operation and emergency response by developing and integrating its Operations and Maintenance Manuals, Flood Incident Management Plans and Dam Safety Emergency Management Plans. The plans have been developed to align with the Australian Inter Service Incident Management System (AIIMS) which G-MW uses as its corporate incident response framework.

This paper provides an overview of the benefits of having structured and integrated manuals and response plans for managing assets, flood and extreme events. The paper also shares G-MW’s experiences in developing this integrated management approach.

Workshop paper – Karunaratne 2011 – Management of Floods in 2010 and 2011 through Goulburn-Murray Water Dams

 

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