Author: Admin

By Ron Pike

Watching the Burdekin Falls Dam with around six metres of water going over the spillway following flood rains in the catchment, we must remember that this is not a rare occurrence.

As far back as 1875 there are records of the Burdekin River rising over 18 metres in just a few hours and repeated reports of 1 to 6 metres of water above the bridge deck at Inkerman. Records of high river flows lasting weeks and months are not uncommon. Following a cyclone in December 1974 the river remained at flood height until April 1975.

These flood flows can exceed 5 mega-litres per second (almost half a million ML every day). This is sufficient to fill our oldest irrigation storage, Burrinjuck Dam, from empty, every two days.

The roar of this cascading water is the roar of waste – wasted water that will be needed in years of little or no flow.
Continue reading “The Roar of Waste”

The recent flooding in Queensland has led to the not unexpected hand-wringing and wailing from the usual doomsayers including those green zealots who spread alarm about climate change, extreme weather and how any flooding in Queensland is the direct result of our trivial emissions of carbon dioxide.

Back in 2011 flooding in Queensland was declared the worst in 40 years with more than 26,000 homes impacted and, tragically, 16 people drowned. Green Party leader Bob Brown claimed that the coal mining industry was responsible and should pay for the Queensland flood damage. Seemingly unaware that major floods have always visited Queensland, Brown claimed that:

It’s the single biggest cause – burning coal – for climate change and it must take its major share of responsibility for the weather events we are seeing unfolding now.

Continue reading “Floodplains are Plains that Flood”

by Chris McCormack
News Weekly, February 9, 2019

Was the recent mass fish-kill in the Menindee Lakes along the Darling River the result of drought or poor water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin?

The mainstream media would have us believe that every drought is now the result of man’s burning of fossil fuels causing “dangerous climate change”. Meanwhile, the Greens are blaming a lack of “environmental flows” for the fish-kill. Read more.

by Viv Forbes

Water conservation peaked in Australia in 1972 – our last big dam was Burdekin Falls Dam in Queensland built 32 years ago.

Elsewhere in Australia, water conservation virtually stopped when Don Dunstan halted the building of Chowilla Dam on the Murray in 1970 and Bob Brown’s Greens halted the Franklin Dam in 1983 (and almost every other dam proposal since then).

The Darling River water management disaster shows that we now risk desperate water shortages because our population and water needs have more than doubled, and much of our stored water has been sold off or released to “the environment”.

However, we regularly see floods of water being shed by the Great Dividing Range, most of it ending up in the Pacific Ocean, while somewhere to the west of that watershed is in severe drought. Then, under what should be called “The Flannery Plan for Water Conservation”, after letting flood waters run into the sea, they build squillion-dollar desalination plants to get water back from the sea.

Continue reading “Curse Less and Dam More”