Sirinumu Dam
reservoir in Papua New Guinea
The Sirinumu Dam is an important piece of infrastructure within Papua New Guinea, providing both water and electricity to the electrical grid of the capital Port Moresby. The dam itself is located outside of Port Moresby, in Central Province. Its hydroelectric power generation produces most of the power for the city. At times when the dam has been shut down, either due to disputes with local landowners or due to low water levels, there have been water and electricity shortages in the city.
The dam was built by the Australian authorities, which governed the Territory of Papua and New Guinea at the time, from 1958 to 1963. It was built on what remains to this day the customary land of the Koiari people, following agreements made with the landowners. Since the 1970s, local landowners have claimed that the agreements have not been honoured by either the Australian government or later Papua New Guinean governments, and that they themselves lack consistent access to clean drinking water and electricity.
Location and design
The dam is located in Central Province, in a natural basin surrounded by mountains south of Sogeri. The dammed area receives inputs from the Laloki River and a number of its tributaries, which has become Lake Sirinumu. Some of the newly formed islands within the lake remain inhabited.
“Sirinumu Dam” enters the record as reservoir in Papua New Guinea. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sirinumu, reservoir and Papua can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q34924082. Authority coordinates are -9.503, 147.478. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sirinumu Dam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.