Cotton harvest flood: Cubbie Station on-farm storage wall collapses

A dam wall on Cubbie Station has collapsed, flooding adjoining paddocks holding hundreds of bales of recently harvested cotton.

Bales of cotton inundated by more than 30,000 megalitres of water from Cubbie Station’s dam wall breach.

One of Cubbie Station’s massive on-farm storage dams has breached, spilling at least 30,000 megalitres of water into adjoining paddocks covered in hundreds of freshly harvested cotton bales.

Satellite images show a 3km wall on the station’s southeast storage breached at some stage in the past week, although the company is refusing to comment.

On September 4 the satellite images show the dam was intact, but by last Friday water could be seen spreading across three production paddocks.

Cubbie Station's dams in blue, prior to the dam wall breach on September 4

A Sentinel satellite image from last Friday shows a 3km long dam wall on Cubbie Station has breached spilling water out onto cotton fields.

An aerial photograph shared on Twitter on Tuesday this week showed yellow plastic-covered cotton bales half submerged across inundated fields adjoining the on-farm dam.

When The Weekly Times contacted the commodity trader who posted the image, he said staff at Cubbie Station had told him to take it down.

Cubbie Station’s St George Office did not respond to repeated calls.

The satellite images also show water has flowed across at least three cotton fields, each of which is about 3km across and 1km wide.

Ultimately the loss of water is not a significant quantity, considering Cubbie Station’s 537,000 megalitres of on-farm storages appear to be close to full.

However the water damage to hundreds of cotton bales left standing in the paddock and stored along their peripheries must be high, with prices sitting at $900 a bale.

Cubbie Station is owned by the Macquarie Asset Management Fund.