A ballot conducted in 1932 by the Hastings Shire Council indicated that 103 voters said no and 49 said yes when the Shire sought to proceed with a 6,000-pound loan to build the scheme at Blue Creek (Uptin, 1996).
Nevertheless the Hastings Shire proceeded to develop the Blue Creek Scheme. Blue Creek Dam was originally proposed by the late Allan Bain, who failed to live to see its completion in 1939.
The concept of the Blue Creek Dam Scheme, as expected, resulted in significant public debate prior to its adoption. It was finally chosen as the preferred option on the basis that gravity feeding water into Wauchope would be much cheaper than pumping from the river at Koree Island. The total cost of Blue Creek Scheme was £23,000 pounds. With a capacity of around 14.1 million gallons or 78,800 cubic feet (62ML), Blue Creek Dam supplied the township of Wauchope via an 8" (200mm) diameter asbestos cement pipeline.
Blue Creek Dam was opened by the late Mr L. O. Martin, member for Oxley and Minister for Justice on Saturday, 24 June 1939. The original design of the dam failed to accurately project the growth of Wauchope and by the early 1940's it was apparent that an auxiliary pumping station (river inlet) would be required to allow water to be extracted from the Hastings River at Koree Island, during high demand periods.
Following ongoing concerns about the quality and quantity of supply from Blue Creek Dam, the Hastings Shire Council constructed a pumping station at Koree Island in 1944. This pumping station included duplicate submersible pumps and was located upstream of the now existing inlets. Two corrugated iron reservoirs were constructed on the site of the present day quarry at Rosewood Road. An 8" (200mm) diameter asbestos cement pipeline was laid into the township of Wauchope (the last section of this original pipeline has been replaced in 2002).
Blue Creek Dam is a concrete arch dam with a height of 19m (63’4”), a crest link of 54m (180’) and a total storage capacity of 62ML. Despite the consistently poor quality of water from the Blue Creek Dam, it remained in service until the early 1980's.
After use of Blue Creek declined in the 1970’s, the dam remained as an emergency storage up until 1982, when in order to prevent its continual misuse by local water operators, the Chief Engineer has been claimed to have made “unrepairable” modifications to the outlet pipe with a sledgehammer. Blue Creek Dam is now inspected and maintained as a disused supply reservoir.
(Excerpt from 'THE HISTORY OF THE HASTINGS DISTRICT WATER SUPPLY SCHEME' from Hastings Council website)
My father remembers the town water coming on in Wauchope when he was going to school and staying with his grandmother in Wauchope, and my Auties father drove a horse and sled carting concrete during the construction of the dam.
Team_Gnome on top of the dam;
Total distance from the Turn-off on Bago Road is about 3.5km.
A 2WD vehicle can be driven about 1.5km (if you are game, this is a forestry trail after all). There are a couple of places where you can park and not block the road.
If you have a 4WD you can drive almost to the end of the road. Watch out though as the only turn around point is fairly narrow and has a sheer rock wall on one side and a steep drop to Blue Creek on the other. So please be careful...
The cache is an 800mm plastic cliplock container, and as it has a bit of a hiking theme contains a compas, 1m of 6mm cord, caribena, cake of soap, water purification tablets, cable tie, and some far travelled items from Germany (a pencil and box of matches) as well as a coin, pencil sharpener and of course the log book and a pen.