Events - Event View

We are making our way down to Warragamba Dam.

Departing the BP on Parramatta Road, Five Dock (584 Parramatta Road Croydon NSW 2132 Australia), making our way along Parramatta Road to our next stop, the Caltex Woolworths (574 Great Western Hwy, Claremont Meadows NSW 2747) on Great Western Highway Claremont Meadows.

From there we head off to Warragamba Dam, returning along a different route.

KEY TIMES:  
Departing BP Five Dock at 0830
Departing Caltex Woolworths at 0945
Arriving at the Warragamba Dam at about 1100.

A bit about Warragamba Damn

Warragamba Dam is a heritage-listed dam in Warragamba, Wollondilly Shire, New South Wales, Australia. It is a concrete gravity dam, which creates Lake Burragorang, the primary reservoir for water supply for the Australian city of Sydney, New South Wales.

It holds approximately 2,031 GL of water when full and a surface area of 75 square kms.

Construction beginning in 1948, it was officially open 12 years later on the 14th of October 1960.

The dam wall comprises 1,232,00 cubic meters of concrete. It was laid as interlocking blocks roughly 17 meters on each side, which were later grouted together to form a continuous, monolithic wall. It is so large that engineers had to use two techniques to prevent the temperature from becoming too hot as the concrete set. One was to add ice to the wet concrete, the first application of this technique in Australia. The other was to embed cooling pipes into the concrete and circulate chilled water through the pipes. As a result, the dam wall was cooled in a few months instead of the estimated 100 years it would have taken to cool naturally.