1934 YALLOURN OPEN CUT FLOOD
On Thursday, 29 November 1934, very heavy rain fell in Melbourne and moved to the east. There the depression seemed to stick and rain fell from midday Thursday to Saturday morning over the Latrobe Valley catchment – 700 square miles in which four streams unite in a short distance – in amounts that ranged from 10 to 19½ inches.
Early messages to SEC headquarters on Friday, 30 November, reported 350 points, and the river at Yallourn Power Station rising 3 feet an hour. There was, it was stated, ‘a considerable amount of water’ in the open cut. All coal trains except one were brought out, and men began to move electric motors and switchgear from excavating plant. It was back to horses and drays for this work, as power was off in the open cut.
At 3.45pm on that Friday afternoon, R.J. McKay the Engineer-In-Charge, Coal Supply, went into the cut to investigate. He later reported that between 6.25 pm and 8.45 pm, the water rose from 139 feet to 143 feet; unfortunately he could take no further measurements because the water was over the top of the gauge. Five minutes after this report, he said, in a considerable understatement, the position at the power house was ‘somewhat serious’ and in the open cut was ‘causing anxiety’. At the power station, the river pushed out of place the screens on the water intakes and generating units had to shut down briefly while dead animals, leaves and sand were removed.
At 10.07pm, all open cut pumps were under water and thirteen minutes later, a torrent poured into the great hole in the ground. By 11.30am on Saturday the cut, which at its deepest was 63 feet below sea level, was a lake 206 feet deep. The rushing river wrecked the superstructure of the power station weir, destroyed roads and part of the pumping station, buried railways under mud, clogged with silt the power station screen house and water circulating system and carried more than 250,000 cubic yards of earth into the open cut. A bank at the pumping plant was washed away leaving the pumps high and
dry; a mound was built up that excluded water from inlets.
Radio appeals for workers brought 700 men and 115 horses to Yallourn. The town was crowded far beyond capacity. Men were squeezed – sometimes three to a cubicle - into the Brown Coal Mine camps. Working three shifts, they re-opened the old open cut which had been shut down since 1930. Within three weeks, it was producing 300 tons of brown coal a day, more than it had ever done before. By the end of May, the old cut had produced 250,000 tons.
The water from the Yallourn Open Cut had to be removed and the cut operating again before winter set in, with its peak demands for electricity. A ditch was cut to get rid of some water, but only a few feet would run off by gravitation and the rest had to be pumped. In twenty weeks, the difficult task was finished. As plant emerged from the waters, it was overhauled and reconditioned and some coal was coming out by 9 March.
By the middle of April, a coal dredger was back at work in the open cut; it could operate only to the 90 feet level – below that water still lay. By the end of May, 10,000 tons a day was coming from the new cut, but mud covered the lower levels nine months after the flood. It was ironic that the top of the levee bank, although 10 feet higher than any known flood, was only a foot short of this record one. It was decided to build levees 10 feet above the new flood level.
(Courtesy of Yallourn North Action Group Newsletter - August 2013)
