Transcript for Drought workplace interview

[Speaker: Jolyon Taylor]

My name's Jolyon Taylor. My role is Senior Water Resources Engineer. I work at Gippsland Water. I've been an engineer for 21 years, and I've been at Gippsland Water for 19 of those. Gippsland Water services an area across Gippsland, starting along the Princess Highway at Drouin and extending out to Stratford.

What does it mean to work in water?

Working in water interests me because I'm an engineer, but I also love the outdoors and I love the environment of Gippsland and it was a career choice that allows me to get out into a region I like and to apply my skills to manage water, to meet the meet human needs, contribute towards human health and also to good environmental stewardship.

Working in water in a regional part of Victoria, we have to be quite broad in the, in the work that we do. We're not specialists, so we do work with a range of other water industry professionals. Some of those include hydrographers and hydrologists, water resource modellers, regulators who set our rules, and also environmental catchment managers.

Why is it important to prepare for drought?

Droughts are just a fact of life in Victoria and Australia. We have a highly variable climate where droughts have always occurred. Droughts will continue to occur. Climate change may make droughts worse into the future. Planning for sufficient water supply during drought, that's our role. However, the community can assist us by considering how they can be more water efficient in their homes and in their businesses.

Preparing for drought is a critical issue for the whole of Victoria. Over the last 20 years, we've had multiple droughts, and they've affected different parts of Victoria at different times in different ways. For instance, you can see here that around Warragul today it's green. It's often green in this part of Gippsland; it's not always green. Just because it's green doesn't necessarily mean there's always enough water for town water supply. And we have a wide variety of climates within that area.

How do you help combat drought?

So, working at Gippsland Water as Water Resources Engineer, my main responsibility is to make sure that we will always have enough water to supply the drinking water needs of our customers. We do this by looking at historic stream flow records. We look at how climate change might impact upon stream flows into the future. We use computerised water resource models to see how reliable our systems are to meet our customers drinking water needs.

We use a range of technology in our work to help us understand our water resources out there in the field. We use technology to help us with understanding flows in rivers, for instance, we use radar equipment to understand the velocity of water. In rivers, we can't be everywhere at all times, and we want to make sure we've got a good understanding of the flow in our rivers, the level in our reservoirs, and the level in our groundwater wells. We use sensors to help us understand that and those sensors send a signal back to our office that we can see on our computer screens.

How did you come to work in water?

Well, after I finished high school, I went to university. I chose engineering as a degree to study towards. I was drawn to that because I've always liked science. I've always also liked the application of science into real practical things. I used to like to tinker with things when I was younger as well, and I saw that as as a good forward career path with plenty of options.

I graduated from university with a mechanical engineering degree. I then went and spent a few years working as a graduate as an engineer in building services. However, I also liked the country, and I liked the environment, and that career path wasn't quite leading me in that direction. When I saw an opportunity arise to work as a construction supervisor in Gippsland, I took that. However, I moved across to planning pretty soon after that because that gave me the opportunity to merge together my interest in applying science and engineering with my interest in the environment.

How has drought affected Gippsland?

After we'd been experiencing drought for two to three years, one of our towns, Briagolong, out in our far eastern region was suffering such a depleted aquifer, which is the groundwater we used for that town, that we were forced to put that town on water restrictions. We were fortunate that not long after that we did get significant rains. However, what it showed us is that that town, after experiencing weather that was unprecedented, is now not actually reliable enough. And so that triggered the need for us to start planning a new water resource for that town. And we've started doing that.

We've investigated a deeper groundwater resource and proven that that's a reliable source. And we've obtained approval to drill into that deeper aquifer, which will provide that town with greater water security going forward.