Management of entire Perth water supply outsourced to French desalination company
September 27th, 2012 by Warwick HughesA Perth reader sent me this little bombshell from June – so now the French desalination company Degrémont a part of the global SUEZ Environnement Group will “…operate and maintain water production and wastewater treatment assets for Perth.” And yes that includes the 13 dams.

The WA Govt about a decade ago decided to introduce seawater desalination and at the same time allow dams to steadily be “decommissioned” by a creeping process of not managing dam catchment vegetation. A process that has cost Perth water users about a thousand GL of water over say 15 years.
The media release is loaded with all the “expensive water” propaganda – referring to water as “precious” etc. No not precious; water is a common compound that falls free from the sky. We have to have the brains and will to collect it. Our pioneers and forefathers who built our dams would turn in their graves to think we were steadily making the dams more useless by not having the common sense and guts to thin catchment bush – due to political pressure from the Greens. As my reader in Perth said – “I can’t see Degrémont pushing catchment management as a profit centre.” Click more for text of entire media release.
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