Iron pyrite is a mineral. You might know it as fool’s gold, with a gleaming metallic yellow lustre. Strike it with a flint and you’ll get sparks, which is why it was used in flintlock guns.

Unfortunately, as Professor Fitzpatrick’s team tells it, pyrite plus oxygen plus water equals iron and sulfuric acid. You could make it this way yourself if you ever wanted to zap the car battery, but you wouldn’t because the chemical reaction also releases toxic heavy metals. The best thing to do with acid sulphate soils is to cover them – with water. That keeps the oxygen out and stops the process.

Now other scientific teams take to the lectern. They’re from the Environment Protection Authority, the Murray Darling Basin Authority, the federal Environment Department and Natural Resource Management Board. They’re measured, poked and prodded.

They’ve verified 2000ha of sulfuric material in the Lower Lakes. This equates to almost half a million tonnes of sulfuric acid already formed. If the water level in the lakes drops another metre, it will be eight million tonnes of acid. So why is there no water, and why are the Finniss River, Currency Creek and the lakes dry or drying?

Simply, the river states have allocated more water for irrigation than there is rainfall even in a wet year – which this isn’t. No Basin Authority bureaucrat can make it rain and no scientist can make a water molecule without combining a hydrogen and oxygen atom. In every step along the process, chemistry wins.

Bureaucrats and scientists next brought in the engineers, and together they came up with an audacious – its opponents say a dastardly – scheme.

As The Independent Weekly exclusively revealed, they would build three dams: one across the mouth of the Finniss River, another across Currency Creek and a third from the mainland at Clayton across the Goolwa channel to Hindmarsh Island.

The main dam across Goolwa Channel will take 17 weeks to close at a cost of more than $15 million. The Currency Creek dam will take 10 weeks to build and cost more than $3 million, and the $2 million Finniss River dam will take about eight weeks to build.

Boats won’t be able to go through the barriers. Additional boat ramp facilities may be needed for emergencies.

Three dams pack a triple whammy. They will back water up the Finniss and Currency Creek, drowning the acid sulfate soils there.

They will create a lake within a lake – Lake Alexandrina would be completely cut off from this new, artificial pool. And they will try to save the wetlands. This news went down like a sinker among conservation groups. Prominent campaigner Di Bell believes dams aren’t the answer. The Greens are opposed. “The Finniss Catchment Group holds that the current disaster is a result of governments’ inaction and incompetence in the past. This solution is more of the same,” bemoaned its spokesman John Tregenza.

“Despite all the work, efforts, and reasonable, rational and responsible advice from us, the citizens who live on the banks of the lakes and Lower Murray River tributaries, the state and federal ministers responsible for the care and protection of the environment have decided that a costly engineering solution to a man-made disaster needs no examination,” he said.

“It is astounding and alarming that the Australian Minister for the Environment, Mr Peter Garrett, can approve a request by the SA Government to build three additional weirs on Australia’s largest river system without a formal Environmental Impact Statement on which to base his decision. These constructions are in an area of acknowledged natural and historical importance. They are located in an internationally recognised and registered Ramsar site.”

The Finniss Catchment Group is convinced that strategic physical isolation and bi-remediation of the acidified hotspots is an easier, far cheaper and more effective solution.

“Construction of dams and weirs at the end of the Finniss River and Currency Creek will, in fact, create further disasters – a stagnant, smelly pond at the end of the tributaries, kill off the already threatened native fish and bird life, and prevent the freshwater flows from the tributaries from assisting in the remediation of Lakes Alexandrina and Albert and all who depend on them,” Mr Tregenza said.

Not so, argues the SA Water Minister. “Acidification in the lakes is happening at a scale that is unprecedented anywhere in Australia, and possibly the world, so determining the right way to minimise its impacts is vital,” Ms Maywald says.

“The State Government is working with local communities, scientists, technical experts and engineers to address immediate drought response issues and also develop long-term sustainable solutions.”

Trials using limestone to neutralise the acid sulphate soils are under way in the Currency Creek and Finniss River area. Finely ground limestone is spread over drying lakebeds.

The limestone is aimed at raising water pH to levels to allow natural bioremediation, neutralising soils and removing acid from the water. The first stage of the trial – carried out by the Department for Environment and Heritage, Rural Solutions SA and Earth Systems – involved placing 300 tonnes of ultra-fine-grained limestone mounds and arcs up to 100 metres wide in the middle and upper reaches of Currency Creek.

Commonwealth and state governments are determined to involve lakes’ communities in their decisions. “We don’t want to build the dams,” confided a government water biologist. “Neither do politicians. People might blame Garrett or Maywald but they’re only going down this track (of building the dams) because there’s no other apparent choice.” This week, federal River Murray Minister Penny Wong predicted that in a decade’s time, the Murray-Darling Basin’s rivers and wetlands would resemble their natural state and domestic water restrictions could be eased.

The Greens are unconvinced.

“Minister Wong’s dream for the Murray-Darling Basin’s water future will remain just that – a lovely dream – if current water practices and attitudes continue,” said Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.

But many South Australians share the dream, the dream of a wet.

In SE Queensland late this week, flash flooding closed roads, created landslides and raised dam storage levels from 60 to 80 per cent almost overnight. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, surveying the flood carnage around Brisbane, immediately announced she would abolish the Queensland Water

Commission which had been set up with a $9 billion kitty to drought-proof the region. Another government corporation, Linkwater, will have its role changed.

The rains will come again to SA and the Murray catchment.

By then we may have learnt not to blame others for the river’s mismanagement, and to accept a degree of local responsibility.

Whether we do that, will be the acid test.