A big drink for the Menindee Lakes - Darling River Run

The Menindee lakes are a series of 9 large lakes that feed into the lower part of the Darling river in Australia, with recent rainfall up in Queensland allot of that water has traveled down south.

The lakes are revieving thier first good drink in a number of years.
Their has been a few fish kills in the darling river downstream of the lakes, so with any luck thier will be enough for a bit of a flush and to put a bit of oxygen back in the water.

If you go through my nsw playlist playlist you will see who much the DARLING river can change in a relatively small amount of time. #darlingriver #menindeelakes

There are 4 main lakes in the system:
Lake Wetherell
Lake Pamamaroo
Lake Menindee (the largest lake, also known as Lake Minandichi
Lake Cawndilla.
The lakes rely on replenishment, when water flows over the banks of the Darling (Barka) River.The NSW Government modified the lakes (completed 1968) to improve their storage capacity for farming, recreation, mining and urban water supply and to help manage floods in the Darling River. In the 1960s, governments decided to use some of the lakes as water storages, building a large weir (Main Weir) to divert water into lakes Pamamaroo, Tandure and Bijijie. Levees, block dams and channels were built to regulate the flow of water in the system. There is relatively little information on the flooding regimes of the lakes before they were regulated (dammed) in the 1960s but they were undoubtedly highly productive and important wetland systems where many fish were spawned.
The Menindee Lakes Water Storage Scheme supplies water to Broken Hill, the lower Darling and to water users along the Murray River in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia under the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement. Seven of the lakes have been incorporated in an artificially regulated overflow system providing both for flood mitigation and as storage for domestic use, livestock and irrigation downstream. The lakes are also important for waterbirds.
Recent research (Thoms and Delong 2018) found that the food webs have changed in a way that suggests that the ecological resilience of the system has declined.
The lakes were filled to capacity in 2021 with Lakes Cawndilla and Lake Menindee filling completely in early September meaning that the system was filled to over 98 per cent capacity with water flowing into Lake Speculation for the first time since 2012.

00:00 - intro
00:32 - Darling River, Pooncarie
00:46 - Traveling to Karoola Station
01:14 - Darling River at Karoola Station
01:32 - Menindee Township and Darling River
02:05 - Lake Menindee
02:47 - Drone Footage over Lake Menindee
04:37 - Lake Pamamaroo (Menindee)
04:55 - Lake Pamamaroo Free Camp
05:19 - Drone Footage over Lake Pamamaroo
05:57 - Outro