Qualla: Sirinumu Dam

Sirinumu Dam: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the water level at Lake Sirinumu drops, Port Moresby's lights dim. The capital of Papua New Guinea draws more than half of its electricity from a hydroelectric plant in the Rouna Gorge, fed by water piped down from a mountain lake that did not exist until the Australians dammed it between 1958 and 1963. The dam sits in a natural basin south of Sogeri, on what remains the customary land of the Koiari people. Since the 1970s, those landowners have been asking - sometimes politely, sometimes by shutting the dam down - why the capital gets power and water from their ancestors' ground while they themselves often have neither.

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Sirinumu Dam: A Steel-Faced Wall

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The main dam is an unusual design: steel-faced rockfill, a type with very few examples elsewhere in the world. Part of the soil on which it rests is laterite - the iron-rich red tropical soil that bakes hard when exposed but softens dangerously when saturated. Seven earthfill sad...

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Sirinumu Dam: The Six Clans, and What They Lost

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By one account, six Koiari clans lived on the land the dam flooded: Wanowari, Orari, Monitori, Magibiri, Tuiya, and Bemuri. By another account, the Wakai people had four villages here - the two larger ones called Yoadabu and Gebodabu, the smaller two Araidabu and Sabetana. The Au...

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Sirinumu Dam: Payments That Never Quite Work

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 31 January 1992, the government approved annual rental payments of 130,000 kina until 1995. In 1996, the Sirinumu Development Company was set up through PNG Power to handle payments to the landowners. The landowners do not consider this a success. Demands for compensation stre...

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Sirinumu Dam: When the Dam Runs Dry

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Port Moresby gets less rainfall than most of mainland Papua New Guinea, and the city's population keeps growing. Sirinumu is the capital's only supplying dam, though it lies outside city limits. Even with it, water access in Port Moresby is low - and the dam itself frequently sit...

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Sirinumu Dam: Lake Sirinumu Today

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The lake has become something other than what the engineers built. Kayakers and canoeists paddle across the high water where villages used to stand. Tilapia farms near the shore host visitors who come up from Port Moresby to see. The lake serves as a starting point for hikes to t...

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