Burrendong Dam is a Rock-fill dam with a clay core across the Macquarie River upstream of Wellington in New South Wales, Australia.
The dam impounds Lake Burrendong and is filled by the waters from the Macquarie and Cudgegong rivers.
The dam was constructed in 1967 to provide flood mitigation. A small quantity of electricity is generated from the flow of the water leaving Burrendong Dam. On 9 February 1999, the Premier of New South Wales the Honourable Bob Carr, officially opened the hydroelectricity station, owned by Power Facilities Pty Limited.
The height of the dam wall is 76m high, the equivalent height of a 25 storey building, and is 1,113m wide at the crest. The water depth is 57m and at 100% capacity the water level is 344m above sea level. The surface area of the dam is 7,200ha, equal to nearly 10,000 football fields, and the catchment area of the dam is 13,900km².[1]
Burrendong Dam has a capacity of 1,188,000 megalitres(ML) at 100%. This amount of water can fill Sydney Harbour 3 times over. On top of this the dam has a further flood mitigation capacity of 480,000ML, and when the flood capacity is used the total amount of water within the dam is equal to over four Sydney Harbours.
The spillway on the dam is a gated concrete chute, with a release capacity of 1,199,000ML per day.
Burrendong Dam has twice been recorded at a critically low level of 1.5% in drought. In contrast, however, Burrendong has mitigated potentially devastating floods downstream by using its flood capacity and releasing water in accordance with downstream tributary flows, safely reaching 160% of capacity in 1990 and 152.8% in 2010.