Watermills, millraces, dams and weirs
Exploring alternatives to losing the Wilson weir
Warkworth watermills millraces and weirs
A more apposite topic for the next town-hall talk could scarcely be conceived. The fact that such a topic has already been conceived, is another story, hopefully for the following Warkworth Town Hall Talk. On Wednesday 13 March, the historian…
Millrace to the rescue of whitebait and weir
Millennia before human habitation, the natural sandstone weir at the Mahurangi River tidehead would have formed a formidable barrier to īnanga in their imperative to migrate from the sea to freshwater reaches. Then, over about the last 6000 years, towards…
Warkworth, the watershed, and the whitebait
Mahurangi was always going to need all the help it could get. When, in 2004, the then Auckland Regional Council announced a $3 million, 5-year kickstart to address the harbour’s elevated sediment accumulation rate, Mahurangi Action was advised…
Energy and the dammed Mahurangi
Dam the Mahurangi River and generate electricity. Such a proposal would face fierce opposition. But what if the dam was already in place; built more than a century since. The dam, otherwise known as the Wilson cement works weir, is located almost…