Council has reaffirmed its opposition to the planned raising of Warragamba Dam's wall, reiterating its concerns about the potential adverse effects on Indigenous heritage and on the World Heritage Area.
Councillors voted at this week's meeting to write to both planning minister, Rob Stokes, and Blue Mountains MP, Trish Doyle, seeking their help to get the project axed and instead reallocate the estimated $2 billion in construction and biodiversity offsets costs to flood mitigation downstream of the dam.
Council will also make a submission on the dam's environmental impact statement (EIS), raising issues including:
- The likelihood of significant damage to the cultural heritage of the Gundungurra First Nation;
- the impact on the biodiversity of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area;
- watering down of environmental protections to enable the project to proceed; and
- concern that the public exhibition time for the EIS is too short considering the document is 1,500 pages long.
Meanwhile, the CEO of the Insurance Council of Australia, Andrew Hall, has said the money planned for raising the wall would be better used buying back land that never should have been developed in the first place.
Mr Hall told an industry forum last month that governments should never have allowed housing to be built on the flood plain around Penrith.
"Western Sydney's river systems operate as massive storm water drains from rainfall on the surrounding mountains. A lot of focus at the moment is happening around the Warragamba Dam debate - I think for all those good reasons around the environment and the cultural heritage issues up in Warragamba.
"But the reality is the money that we would spend on raising the Warragamba Dam wall, we probably should think about spending on claiming back some areas that never should have been developed in western Sydney."
And he said that no matter how high the wall was, there was always the possibility that the water could "over top" and spill.
"Even if we do raise the dam wall, that should never give false comfort because dam walls over top. No matter how big you build a dam, it can keep raining and then over top. So it holds back a bit of flood water but it eventually floods.
"I think there is no simplistic answer and some of these are really hard conversations to have with communities that are established - that in fact governments 50 years ago, 100 years ago ... made very poor decisions in allowing you to build there in the first place."
The ICA has withdrawn its support for the dam wall raising, in part because of the potential destruction of Indigenous cultural sites which would be inundated.
But Stuart Ayres, the minister for western Sydney, told the Sydney Morning Herald the option of buybacks had been assessed by the government and reported on in the EIS, with the report indicating raising the wall was the most effective flood-mitigation option.
