North Pine Dam - History

History

The North Pine Dam opened on 12 August 1976 by the Lord Mayor of Brisbane City Council, Alderman Frank Sleeman. The accompanying water treatment plant is also managed by South East Queensland Water.

The dam meant that many of the surrounding grazing and dairy farms were compulsorily acquired, and the only evidence of these farms is now the names of roads leading to the lake's shoreline, such as Winn Road and Golds Scrub Lane. Golds Scrub Lane now leads only to the Samsonvale Cemetery; prior to the flooding of the dam, the site was also home to a church and a post office. To allow for the dam's flooding, 27 kilometres of road had to be relocated and rebuilt.

In May 2007, the dam, which was providing about 100 ML per day or 20% of the South East Queensland region's water supply, was taken offline as a safety precaution. This was due to a drought in which water levels had dropped to 14% capacity, the lowest since it was built. The cessation of water supply was meant to protect the dam from potential blue green algae blooms in the coming summer months. The operators continued to release between 8-10 million litres per day to service the North Pine River.

Read more about this topic:  North Pine Dam

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.
    Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
    Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)