The ‘risky’ plan to take 31,000 Olympic swimming pools from beneath WA’s largest river
The Western Australia government has proposed a groundwater management plan that could extract the equivalent of over 31,000 Olympic swimming pools from the Martuwarra Fitzroy River each year. Environmentalists express concerns that this plan threatens the river's ecosystem, particularly the critically endangered freshwater sawfish. The government claims the plan balances environmental protection with economic opportunities, but experts warn it could have detrimental effects on the river's health.
- ▪The proposed plan aims to increase groundwater extraction from 32 gigalitres to nearly 76 gigalitres annually.
- ▪The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is the largest river in Western Australia, spanning over 700 kilometres.
- ▪Environmentalists argue that the plan could jeopardize the survival of the endangered freshwater sawfish.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/the-risky-plan-to-take-31-000-olympic-swimming-pools-from-beneath-wa-s-largest-river-20260519-p5zypj.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 16:46:07 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T06:52:46.079Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T06:52:46.079Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 3LThi7XdvJu1 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.