Lock up your waters!!

"Water-sensitive urban design: Design of subdivisions, buildings and landscape which enhances the opportunities for at-source conservation of water, rainfall detention and use, infiltration, and interception of pollutants in surface runoff from the block."

The NSW Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources has provided us with a really comprehensive water glossary as a support to our conversations with regard to our ongoing water management crisis. Everything's a crisis at the moment. I keep reading about water detention where I would say water retention, so I came to this site to consult. Even they take the locking up of waters for granted. The concept of water illegally entering our country is rather ironic considering we have so little of it and therefore we'd have to put it in a detention centre to see if it has the right to stay here or not. Detained waters. It's hilarious. It is a concept we need to have as such. Detention tanks are there to hold water which has not been treated for consumption and hasn't been treated to be perfectly safe, so it has to be detained until it passes muster. I think that is what water detention is as far as I can see. Funny use of vocabulary, though.

A-Z of Water - Water Facts - Waterworks.net.au

Water Worries

Well, we are depressed. This weekend is is beautiful and we should be out in our gardens like we normally are. No. We are not. The last two weekends were hot and dry and we have had no rain. So we are fed up already. We spent months watching our gardens go dry last summer. We watched trees die and animals suffer. We breathed in lungs full of dust which made us so sick this winter. Then we spent all of autumn repairing the damage and were overjoyed to see our gardens come back to life and look so good. So we organised all the drought proofing and in two weekdns it is shot to pieces and the land is dry and things have browned off. We have restrictions and we have rain water tanks but Adelaide is despondant. We don't care. Our gardens are full of weeds and grass gone to see and we are not getting outour lawnmowers, we are not breaking our backs weeding and so Adelaide, which is normally a very pretty , tidy, well kept place is going to look like no one cares. We don't. We want water. We are not water wasters. We wnat enough water to make it worthwhle to garden and make things pretty. We can't keep carting buckets around when it  is hot and we are working. It is a 19th century approach and we live in 2008. We want to be able to have enough water so we can continue to work. The dry grass will be a fire hazard as will be the unraked leaves . When Adelaide gets like this there is no knowing which way we shall turn...but the worm will turn.