Alice Springs town basin, review 2003
Read, R. E.
E-Publications; E-Books; PublicationNT; Report ; no. 42/2003
2003-12-01
Made available via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).
Date:2003-12
English
Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment
Alice Springs
Report ; no. 42/2003
application/pdf.
Check within Publication or with content Publisher.
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/229443
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/672980
To summarise: All the 440 ML of storage available in the Northern Zone could be pumped at under 1000 mg/L and most at 800 mg/L. Bore yields are generally less than 5 L/s, except for some bores around Colacag Park. In the Southern Zone only a trivial amount of water less than 1000 mg/L could be extracted. In the long term water quality depends on the fate of the salt in the water pumped. If salt leaches back to the water table in the zone of pumping salinity will continue to deteriorate. If salt does not return to the aquifer the induced recharge from the Todd will steadily lower the salinity. This could be achieved by; exporting water is or to another part of the basin. exporting water out of the basin. storing salt in the unsaturated zone. The latter would be difficult to achieve in the Town Basin because of the shallow water tables and the permeable basin sediments. 800 1200 1600 2000 TDS in mg/L 0 400 800 1200 1600 2000 Es tim at ed e xt ra ct ab le s to re d vo lu m e M L Southern Zone of Town Basin Figure 29 Extractable stored volume in the Southern Zone against TDS. 6 Water Extraction The locations of production bores are shown in Figure 30 . Graphs of TDS against time are in Appendix E. Table 9 gives details of those now in use. The locations of historic production bores used for town water supply in the past have also been shown. Some difficulty was experienced in relating the bore names or numbers used by Quinlan and Woolley (1969) and Wilson (1958) to registered numbers, and two of the bores could not be identified in the DIPE system at all. Production bores were drilled for the Commonwealth Department of Works, with technical advice being given by the Resident Geologist of the BMR. Many of these bores were not 46