Like a sentry keeping watch at the gates of an ancient city, a temporary water monitoring station on the banks of the Murray River is monitoring the most immediate danger to Cobram’s residents and their property.
Moira Shire Council recently teamed up with Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning through the Regional Water Monitoring Partnership to deploy the equipment near the old bridge on the Murray River.
The site has been installed for data and information collection purposes relating to town flood operations and levee monitoring for Cobram, as well downstream towns including Barmah.
This initiative has been prompted by the high storage levels of Lake Hume and Dartmouth Dam and the Bureau of Meteorology’s recent La Niña climate forecast for south-eastern Australia.
Moira Shire’s director of infrastructure services Joshua Lewis said: “We’ve seen as a bit of a gap in terms of monitoring river levels”.
“We knew there was a significant gap in how the river was reacting to rainfall events, which was a little bit of an unknown and we wanted to take that out of the system.
“So we've been able to establish this other gauging station, which will make our ability to predict other implications from a flooding perspective, but also warn downstream neighbours what might be coming their way.”
Data from the station is passed on to the Bureau of Meteorology and Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority to assist with predictive flood modelling.