Sunday, February 5, 2012

Where to go the flood waters?


The media always highlights the environmentalists concern about lack of water for the Murray River and how it is essential to steal more water off the irrigators for "environmental flows" to maintain an idealistic "healthy river". So far not a squeak about the enormous amount of flood waters presently building up in the headwaters of the Murray-Darling Basin and what all to do about it.

Today we learn that at St George, Queensland, hometown of Barnaby Joyce, the Balonne River has risen to a record 14 metres and is expected to peak at 15 metres on Wednesday. These flood waters are heading south west to the town of Burke which is located on the Darling River. The people of Moree, NSW, are recovering from record flooding of the Gwydir River whose waters eventually reach Burke and flow southward to the Murray River at Wentworth on the Victoria border, and thence to Renmark in South Australia.

These flood waters are God's gift to Australia. Logically one would expect that downstream in NSW, VIC, SA that water users (farmers, town suppliers) would be extracting, using and storing as much river water as possible before the flood waters arrive in a few weeks time. I wonder what the latest unreleased MDBasin Plan has to say about it all, since this action is of great importance to the future prosperity of the Basin, which is Australia's major food bowl.

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