photo friday: drained

A fault with weir gates on Adelaide's River Torrens has drained most of the water from the city's Torrens Lake.

City officials today said a fault with the automatic mechanism to open and close the weir gates allowed millions of litres of water to flow out to sea.

Maintenance crews had since shut the gates manually and locked them closed.

The incident left the lake's muddy bottom exposed along with debris.

Yep... that's how the Torrens has looked since Thursday morning... I snapped a few shots on my walk this morning (actually I wish I'd had my camera with me yesterday because now they've put big ugly fencing up which blocks the view and a lot of photo opportunities, dammit)...

I'm not sure if the boats in the shot are the two exact boats that I photographed back in January last year or not, but it kind of gives you an idea of how much water was lost.

It was something of a shock yesterday morning to wander down my usual path and find myself confronted with a severely reduced Torrens... but at the same time, really really interesting... especially given all the aforementioned "debris"...

There's enough old abandoned bikes to stage a mini Tour Down Under... an army of mud coated shopping trolleys that have been sent to a watery grave... and a collection of discarded chairs that probably could have serviced a small garden party (and quite a number of them were down near the University Footbridge, so I suspect drunk uni students had a hand in that).

But the pièce de résistance has to be the sunken car.

Yep, that's right... a whole entire car, buried in the mud about halfway up it's windshield. And it's right in the middle of the river, so I really want to know how it got there...

Also up for special mention is what seems to be an umbrella that was sitting right-side-up in the mud... weird.

Of course everybody is now playing the blame/finger pointing game... but it does look like they're not going to be filling it up any time soon, and with all the current drama about water here in Adelaide, they would have to be mad to even try it.

There's also been a lot of talk about how unattractive it is, and what an eyesore and stinky this and shame that and blah blah blah... and sure, it's not something you're going to turn into a postcard, but it's kind of interesting, especially if we're now looking at the original course of the river.

Plus the birds are loving it... there's all sorts of things for them to eat and all this new ground for them to hang out on, which could lead to some decent photo opportunities.

And, you know, I have quite often walked along the Torrens and wondered just what might be lurking at the bottom of the riverbed... now I know...

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