Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Floods

Nathan Dam would have mitigated Theodore flooding

By

State and federal governments, blinded by alarmist reports falsely predicting a dry future, have done very little about flood mitigation – except perhaps from sea-level rise.

Earlier today, the small town of Theodore was evacuated as the Dawson River flooded.     

The Dawson River merges with the McKenzie River, forming the Fitzroy River, which flows through Rockhampton and into Keppel Bay – a little to the south of where I now live.

For years locals have wanted the river dammed upstream of Theodore including for the development of irrigated agriculture.

Construction was to be completed in 2005, but the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Queensland Conservation Council fought the Commonwealth Government over potential downstream impacts on the Great Barrier Reef and won – and construction never started. 

In 2006 the Nathan Dam was identified again as important infrastructure, this time for the Central Queensland Regional Water Supply Strategy, in particular for the mining industry. 

Planning for the dam, however, was again interrupted for environmental reasons, in particular the potential impact of the dam on the critically endangered Boggomoss Snail. 

Initially the Commonwealth Department of Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts mandated a translocation trial to assess the viability of relocating the snail to an alternative habitat – then it was discovered there were many more snails and with a wider geographic range than initially thought.

I am not normally in favor of more dam building, for example, there are already enough dams within the Murray-Darling Basin.  And I am against grand schemes to pipe water long distances at great expense, for example from North Queensland to the Murray Darling Basin.

However, Queensland could do with a few more dams particularly dams like the proposed Nathan Dam.   The water would be used locally for mining and also to develop a local irrigated agricultural industry.   At the moment much of the catchment is grazed, and that has its own environmental impact.

And I wonder if there might not be a net environmental benefit from the dam if it stops the flooding of towns like Theodore and the city of Rockhampton.

How significant are water quality impacts on a body of water, when it flows, for example, through a town like Theodore?

*********************

Related Links:

Theodore floods: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12084735 

WWF wins court case against Nathan Dam: http://www.edo.org.au/edoqld/new/nathanwin.pdf

Recent planning for the Nathan Dam: http://www.derm.qld.gov.au/water/infrastr_prg_works/pdf/nathan-dam-qr-aug2010.pdf 

And I spoke to these notes in Sydney earlier in the year, about how we live in a land of floods as well as drought, but government was not listening: http://www.htw.com.au/Industry_Presentations/Jennifer-Marohasy-Presentation-Sydney-2010.pdf

Official Seasonal Forecasts Wrong Again

By

“Let’s hope Santa isn’t relying on weather forecasts from the U.K. Met Office. The British deep freeze of recent weeks (which has also immobilized much of continental Europe) is profoundly embarrassing for the official forecaster. Just two months ago it projected a milder than usual winter.

“This debacle is more than merely embarrassing. The Met Office is front and centre in rationalizing the British government’s commitment to fight catastrophic man-made global warming with more and bigger bureaucracy, so its conspicuous errors raise yet more questions about that “settled” science…

Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/12/21/peter-foster-rosy-u-k-cheeks-mean-red-faces-at-the-met-office/#ixzz18sd33Kcb

Meanwhile in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology was forecasting below average rainfall for those parts of the Murray Darling Basin that were dumped on early September, with the worst flooding in 15 years.   Last summer (2009-2010) the forecast was for more dry, and overall we have been led to believe it wouldn’t ever rain again like it used to, thus the investment in desalination etcetera.

And because the mainstream media, at least most journalists, are partial to Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, they don’t hold the Bureau accountable for any of their expensive and wrong seasonal forecasts.

Back to the UK, according to Peter Foster: “[T]he price tag on the country’s unpreparedness for this winter could reach $15-billion.”

And in Australia, never mind even trying to even get an estimate on what unpreparedness for the floods might be costing, we can’t even get the relevant water managers to agree that topping up a deluge with releases from a dam only 20 percent full has consequences…

Read more: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/2010/12/government-to-finally-act-on-bureaucratic-flooding/

Oh.  And from Peter Forster in parting: “…The suggestion that forecasting the climate is easier than forecasting the weather comes into the same category as acknowledging that governments couldn’t run a lemonade stand, but then believing that they can “manage” an economy.”

Snowy Hydro Still in Denial: Ben Glover

By

SNOWY Hydro has denied playing a role in exacerbating this month’s devastating floods despite a leaked document which appears to show that the authority released almost 7000 megalitres from Eucumbene Dam on December 8 – causing water levels to rise to peaks of close to 10 metres downstream in the Murrumbidgee.

Any water release from Eucumbene, floods or no floods, has raised eyebrows among a number of farmers and politicians, specifically because it is just over 20 per cent full, and Riverina MP Michael McCormack has labelled it “a disgrace”.

“It’s totally ridiculous to think that any dam would be releasing water when it’s nowhere near its capacity,” Mr McCormack said. “It’s totally incomprehensible that this would happen.”

The document in question, obtained by The Daily Advertiser this week, maps the inflows and outflows from each of the major dams on December 8 and is known as an operational plan.

It was initially sourced from a Snowy Hydro staff member concerned with the disregard shown for communities downstream.

Snowy Hydro has since rejected the veracity of the document however, explaining that it was just a “forecast model”, which was changed so that the floods downstream could be mitigated for.

The company has refused however, to provide the actual operational plan for December 8, citing “commercial in confidence”.

Snowy Hydro’s role in the floods was last week called into question by a number of media outlets and on December 15, metropolitan newspapers reported Snowy Hydro CEO Terry Charlton’s claims that the authority had not released any water on December 8.

“What we did last week, because we anticipated the floods, is we stopped releasing anything on Wednesday,” Mr Charlton said.

“So we took as much as possible into storage to mitigate the floods.

“But by Thursday and Friday we didn’t have the capacity to store it because we were chockers.”
A spokesman for Snowy Hydro has this week maintained Mr Charlton’s defence.
“We’ve already commented on these assertions and we have nothing further to add to what was in the Sydney press last week,” the spokesman said.

Tumut mayor Trina Thomson lives near the river and very nearly had to evacuate her home during the peak of the floods. She has called for Snowy Hydro to make available any data that could paint a clearer picture as to why the floods got to the level they did.

“I’d appreciate some transparency considering we have a number of landholders impacted on by the recent flood,” Cr Thomson said. “I think there are some grey areas that have to be clarified.”

Member for Murrumbidgee Adrian Piccoli, Wagga MP Daryl Maguire and NSW Opposition spokeswoman for water Katrina Hodgkinson were also strong in their views that Snowy Hydro should release all relevant data, but the office of the NSW Water Minister, Phillip Costa, refused to buy into the debate, saying only that they “would not comment on hypotheticals”.

Instead they brushed the issue aside to be dealt with by the NSW Office of Water, which sent a generic statement.  “Snowy Hydro operates within the conditions of its operating licence
and the NSW Office of Water ensures compliance,” the statement said.

“In response to a recent five-year licence review, both Snowy Hydro and the NSW Office of Water have increased the amount of information on operations available on their websites.”

Update: This article is now available on the website of The Daily Advertiser: http://www.dailyadvertiser.com.au/news/local/news/general/snowy-hydro-under-fire-over-water-release/2032134.aspx 

**********

Ben Glover from The Daily Advertiser in Wagga Wagga is the only person to have asked me directly for a copy of the Operational Plan.   Staff at both The Australian and the Australian Financial Review are aware of the story, aware of the leaked document, but so far have not followed-up or indicated that if I sent them a copy of the Operational Plan they may be too busy to follow-up or are about to go on Christmas holidays and couldn’t study it until January 5.   Prolific commentator at this blog, Polyaulax, has not  followed-up by asking for a copy of the document by phone or email.

Market Research and Unhealthy Rivers: David Boyd

By

The market researchers/analysts tell me that you wont win a “counter-intuitive” argument. Because people have been conditioned by repetitive claims of a particular point of view, to forthrightly state the opposite is likely to be dismissed out of hand. So they advise coming at the issue in a more subtle or different way. Sorry,but I am just not built that way! I like to think that I seek after truth and get emotionally upset when I see claims that I regard as untruthful. I do understand that there are deep philosophical arguments about what is truth, but let’s keep it simple.

The debate about our inland rivers is a good example. It seems to me that the (conditioned) starting point for most commentators is that it is taken as a given that “our rivers are unhealthy and that this is due to taking too much water out of them”. The MDB Plan certainly starts from that accepted position. I think that both the lack of health and the excessive extraction claims, are untrue. (And this is where your counter-intuition is triggered and I’ve lost you!) But, please read on…

at David Boyd’s Blog

The Whole Truth: Water Deliberately Dumped into Flooded Area

By

SNOWY Hydro chief executive, Terry Charlton, recently confirmed that water was dumped into the already flooded Murray-Darling Basin, but said the authority had little choice (The Australian, December 15, 2010, page 7).   A real time operational diagram, however, tells a very different story.

Last Wednesday, Snowy Hydro could have sent water into Eucumbene dam.  At only 20 percent it had a storage capacity of a whopping 4 cubic kilometres of water.

Instead, the water managers set the trans-mountain tunnels so water was flowing away from Lake Eucumbene at over 80 cubic metres per second (6,912 megalitres for Wednesday).

Water was filling Talbingo and forcing releases from Jounama pondage into the already spilling Blowering Dam, threatening the township of Tumut and adding to the crisis along the Murrumbidgee River.

As if this wasn’t enough, the real time operational diagram for Wednesday December 8, 2010, shows that this water, drawn from Eucumbene, was also being used by Murray electricity generators pushing even more water directly into the Murray Darling Basin.

“Mr Charlton was incorrect in saying that generation was only from inflows below Eucumbene last Wednesday, although they were large at the time,” a source told me this morning.

“Why weren’t Mr Charlton’s water managers pushing the water back for storage into Eucumbene from the Tumut system,” he asked.

Tumut River residents were issued with urgent evacuation orders last Thursday after the increase in outflows.

Desperate farmers phoned Snowy Hydro last week asking why flood waters were being sent west, rather than east to Lake Eucumbene, given this dam was less than half full, but their calls were ignored.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was built for the storage and diversion of water with hydropower generation as a by product.

Current and past employees claim that the current board and management are now driven almost exclusively by money.

“The management are setting the business up for sale when the NSW government changes next year,” said one source. “They want the balance sheet to look as good as possible so [we] are generating [power] like mad, even when electricity prices are low and irrespective of downstream impacts.”

City Deal That Led to Water Waste: Ross Tyson

By

“AN ARCHAIC agreement hatched in the air-conditioned suites of a Sydney office block has exposed the kind of chronic mismanagement at government level that is driving local farmers to the point of despair.

“The revelation this week that Snowy Hydro is sending millions of litres of water downstream every day into overflowing dams and flood-affected towns along the Murrumbidgee River has left irrigators dumbfounded.

Read more at Area News.

  [Read more…] about City Deal That Led to Water Waste: Ross Tyson