The Morwell River has been redirected 5 times over the decades as the Hazelwood open-cut mine grew (yep, I wondered why they just didn’t over compensate and save themselves a lot of work over the years).
There were three sections that went into decent sized concrete pipes. The first which went around the Hazelwood open-cut (KLP) was 3ks long. The river then headed underground as it bypassed the Yallourn open-cut. We called this section KLP 2.7 as there was a sign warning that the river heads underground for 2.7 kilometers. We only got to do KLP 2.7 the once as they were already engaged in ripping it up. Sadly, due to the tunnels being deep, we got very few photos of 2.7. The third section isn’t very long and as far as I know, it’s the only section that is still underground (yep, the last time they diverted the river they turned it back into an open river). The reason I’ve never done it is that it’s not very long and it comes out on the property of an active power station, although it's in a quiet corner of the property, it just never seemed inviting enough.
We had a lot of fun in KLP. Once again it was hard to get decent photos or footage in the tunnels for fear of damaging your gear, and we weren’t really that dedicated when it came to photography and videoing, however I still have fond memories of floating through the pipe on a hot day with friends.
So now the two main tunnels are long gone so I thought I’d just chuck this up in memory of KLP.
The first two video are both less than 2 minutes long and show a bit of behinds-the-scenes footage that you don’t often see. Everyone likes to show the perfect photo or that cool video shot of the silhouetted explorer walking around the bend… not us.
Then we finally got through.
And as we all know, they killed KLP!
All four videos are the first four videos, they total about 12 minutes) in >this< playlist
