Days before Queensland gets its first look at level five restrictions, the State Government has predicted the Wivenhoe, Somerset and North Pine dams will drop to five per cent by December 2008.

[...]

South-East Queensland's mayors will be briefed on the level five restrictions on Friday morning before the details are made public.

I've been thinking lately that the "% water left in dams" trigger for water restrictions probably isn't the best indicator.

Personally I think perhaps a "rate of replenishment" ratio may be a better trigger. Why wait until we've only got a third of our reserves left before telling people to stop being stupid with water?

I've no idea how practical such a trigger would be. You'd have to check the ratio averaged over a period of time, then when do you stop or start a particular stage?

Note in Melbourne existing % trigger points for Stage 1 through 3 vary depending on the time of year (I presume due to the assumption of rain). Stage 4 is always triggered at 29.3%. Water reserves in Melbourne are currently 33.7%.

Speaking of water... I always thought that not using water outside (ie. Stage 4) wouldn't bother me. I thought the worst that would happen would be that some plants would die. Well, that's true, but what happens before that is that the plants get really thirsty. They grow roots out as far as they can and suck as much water out of the ground as possible. When the ground is clay, this means it shrinks.

Our garage is built on a cement slab sitting on clay. Due to shrinkage over the past two years it's walls have started to crack pretty badly in spots. It probably doesn't help that it's attached to the house which is built on stumps. The house and the garage are moving at different rates.

We've removed all the trees and grasses we can, but unfortunately we can't remove the gum tree on the nature strip, nor the neighbours huge collection of fruit trees that grow about a metre from our garage's outer wall.

So as of yesterday I've started watering our hedge again (with shower water) and started dumping a bucket or two of left over shower/washing water around the ground of the garage in the hope the clay will soak up the water and begin to expand again.

That's the last time I stop watering a tree. They get cranky.