Warragamba Dam celebrates 65th birthday this week
13 OCTOBER 2025WaterNSW is proud custodian of Warragamba Dam, building on the legacy of 1,800 workers from 25 nations who from 1948 to 1960 helped build what is still one of the world’s largest domestic water supply dams.
Today, the dam’s mighty concrete wall rises 142 metres into the sky – higher than the Sydney Harbour Bridge is tall – with three million tonnes of concrete holding back four Sydney Harbours’ of water.
Event details
Join WaterNSW at Warragamba DamFest on Sunday 19 October to celebrate this iconic milestone. Catch the free shuttle bus between DamFest and the Warragamba Dam Visitor Centre to:
- hear from WaterNSW water and heritage experts
- walk or take the shuttle to the dam wall for stunning views of Lake Burragorang
- discover Gundungurra culture at our new outdoor art wall
- enjoy fun educational activities for the kids.
About Warragamba Dam
- Located 65 kilometres west of Sydney in a narrow gorge on the Warragamba River.
- Constructed from 1948 to 1960 by 1,800 workers from 25 different nationalities.
- Three million tonnes of concrete went into the 142-metre high dam wall (higher than the Sydney Harbour Bridge is tall)
- Lake Burragorang holds four Sydney Harbours’ volume of water - 2,064,680 megalitres.
How Warragamba Dam was built
- Two temporary (coffer) dams and a tunnel were built to keep the site dry. More than 2.3 million tonnes of sandstone was removed.
- The dam was built in a series of large interlocking concrete blocks. Overhead cableways lifted 18 tonne buckets to place the concrete.
- Concrete was mixed onsite using 305,000 tonnes of cement and 2.5 million tonnes of sand and gravel.
- Sand and gravel were transported from McCann's Island in the Nepean River via an aerial ropeway.
- Ice was mixed with the concrete to control heat generation and prevent cracks.
- Video: Warragamba: A story of our making
How Warragamba Dam operates today
- Each day WaterNSW selects the best quality water and draws it through screens on 3 outlets in the upstream face of the dam wall.
- Advanced monitoring technology used by WaterNSW transmits a real-time cross section of the storage, identifying the best quality water to transfer to Sydney Water.
- Water flows through a valve house into twin pipelines that feed the water by gravity 27 kilometres to Prospect water filtration plant.
- Sydney Water treats Warragamba Dam water to supply 80% of its more than 5 million customers in Sydney and the Blue Mountains.