The search for bore water to supplement Tenterfield Dam's town water supply continues, with a mix of moderate and extremely disappointing results.
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High hopes for the archery test bore were dashed when 72-hour draw-down testing revealed a replenishment rate of just three litres a second, rating it a 3/10 in council chief executive Terry Dodds' books.
Results from the next test bore west of the New England Highway on a road reserve near the southerly 80kmph zone were even more disappointing. It's rated at 0/10.
Drillers have since moved onto the next best-ranked site, on Tenterfield Station, but equipment failure has put that effort on hold until repairs are made.
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On the plus side, Mr Dodds said it was only through incredibly good luck that equipment at the archery test bore was not lost in Friday's fire.
"It burned grass around the generator and polypipes but didn't melt the plastic dials or indicator gauges," he said.
A thousand-litre diesel tank on site also escaped damage.
Mr Dodds is seeking an additional contribution of around nine litres/second of water from multiple bore sites, not including Shirley Park, to arrest the town's current backward water level trend of 0.25 million litres per day and to give much-needed redundancy.
"In simple terms, Shirley Park bore can't keep up," he said. "Even if it did, having all our eggs in this one tenuously fragile basket hasn't proved good.
"The dam is inexorably dropping and we're not even in the high evaporation period yet."
He's pinning his hopes on the Tenterfield Station test drill, which is number five of the 13 potential sites identified. It is intended to have another look at a site near the Tenterfield Transport Museum, but after that the remaining sites are much farther away from the dam. As such they will be expensive to pump and it will take longer to lay pipes back to the Water Filtration Plant.
As the quest continues, Mr Dodds feels vindicated in council's early moves to address its water shortage, given the dire straits in which many towns now find themselves.
"People thought we were exaggerating the urgency, but we've been proven right as the dam level is now down to 29 per cent," he said.
Drilling near Tenterfield Station will recommence on Wednesday, September 18.