Evening Light…..

This is the Taylor River in flood upstream of the actual Dam outlet. It flows down from the south-east catchment high in the Wither Hills. The river abuts the lake. There is a connection between the two water bodies. When the river floods, as it has done at present, the excess water flows into the lake. There it is held, with the water rising and flooding around the lake. That gives valuable time for flood waters to gradually be fed through the Dam’s outlet and then downstream, eventually passing through the stop-bank systems and through the Blenheim town centre. So the lake is a flood retention structure which has successfully prevented catastrophic flooding of Blenheim since its construction in 1965.