CANBERRA, Australia, May 2 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Parts of Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) are on the brink of running out of water, after the driest wet season in decades.
The NT, home to much of the Australian Outback, experienced its driest wet season in 27 years, between Oct and April, with rainfall 34 percent lower than average, and the hottest season in recorded history with maximum daytime temperatures 2.5 degrees Celsius above the long-term average.
“It was really extreme, it was a very unusual wet season,” Nick Loveday, a Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) forecaster, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Thursday.
The Darwin River Dam, which supplies water to the NT’s capital city, is at 75 percent capacity, down from 98 percent at the start of May, 2018.
The situation is significantly worse in rural Darwin, where aquifers, underground stores of water retrieved via wells, could run dry before the end of the dry season.
“Under a normal water-use scenario, there’s going to be unprecedented declines in the aquifer levels, so that being the case, there will be water supplies drop out,” Des Yin Foo, the NT’s director of water assessment, said.
“It’s a pretty serious situation,” Foo said.
“It’s unlikely that farmers in Darwin’s rural area can go about their business as usual,” Foo said.
“At this point in time, the message should be to expect to reduce your water use, and for producers to expect possibly a reduced harvest this year,” Foo added.
Simon Smith, president of the NT Farmers Association, previously expressed concern about aquifer levels and is now calling for households and farmers to work together to reduce water usage.
“At the moment, it’s seen that we can pump out as much water as we want, and that’s wrong, and people need to understand the consequences of that,” he said.– NNN-AGENCIES
