About the flooding in Australia

by Tony Zilles, Digital Business Media

It's always good to get reports direct from the field, unfiletered by the establishment media's need for eyeballs. Here, Tony Zilles reports from Melbourne, Australia about the flooding affecting his country. I've know Mr Zilles for more than a decade, and spent a delightful day with his as my tour guide during my visit to Sydney some years ago.

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Floods in Queensland and Northern New South Wales are of no immediate effect on me personally as I live around 1,700km (1,056 miles) south of Brisbane in Melbourne. However it will affect others in my family that live in that area, although they're all on high ground.

Indirectly the flooding will affect everyone in Australia almost immediately with some food prices sure to rise as a result and a massive redirection of resources and energy into damaged areas as the waters recede. As you will have seen, the flooding is extreme across the eastern states of Australia and truly devastating.

Floods are a fact of life in Australia as much of the inland country is very flat and rainfall drains away very slowly. The flooding in Brisbane, on the other hand, is the result of heavy rainfalls on large catchments in the coastal mountain range that drain out quickly and dramatically through Brisbane into the Pacific Ocean.

The devastation is by no means unprecedented. Flooding of a similar magnitude occurred in Brisbane in 1974. The difference is that much of the area inundated at that time was parkland or undeveloped space. Growth and multi-level residential development has taken over so much of that space now and it affects many more people, buildings and infrastructure than it did 36 years ago.

For many people affected now the last major flood was beyond their personal memory. That, combined with the scale of devastation and the speed with flood waters have risen has come as a savage blow to those involved. The transition from a relatively scary, but safe, water level to a raging torrent has developed within minutes in some cases. This is a situation that most people are just not prepared for mentally or physically.

[View this remarkable video www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12158608, where footage shot by David Jutsum in Toowoomba shows cars being swept away]

It is still raining by the way, although I just read that flood height predictions are being revised down. Extraordinary rainfalls are still occurring across a vast area of eastern Australia. Flood mitigation controls are close to capacity. All are releasing water in order to provide capacity to absorb further anticipated surges.

In bitter irony, the flooding comes after 10 years of severe drought across the entire country.
Many communities are isolated with no road or rail communication, meaning no food, fuel, medicine or supplies of any kind can get in. While remote outposts were once well-stocked and able to cope with 6 or 12 month intervals between restocking, this state of affairs is fading into history with everyone everywhere reliant on their fresh supplies of Californian oranges, asparagus from Peru and so on. (Don't get me started on that one!) I read that there will be airlifts of essential supplies to remote communities probably using military transport helicopters.

Here in Melbourne it is also raining steadily, and flood warnings are current across the state. It is very unlikely that we will experience a similar situation to Brisbane as we just don't get that tropical kind of deluge and the entire city is not on a flood plain like Brisbane is. There is occasional flash flooding and sometimes major rural roads become impassible, but this is usually quite short-lived and inconvenient rather than catastrophic.

Queensland and New South Wales will require a massive clean-up effort in coming months and rebuilding over a many years. Crops, infrastructure, homes, commercial buildings, cars, equipment, livelihoods have all been washed away. The return to a normal life for many people in the north will be long and hard.

Apparently people are canceling their Queensland holiday bookings in droves -- this is our summer now -- not wishing to be stranded or washed away. This is yet another effect of the flooding on the economy.

 

Comments

[R. Paul Waddington]

Whilst much (press) focus is on the flooding in east portion of our continent, at the same time we have raging bush fires destroying lives, lively hood, livestock and property on the west coast. Furthermore, for some individuals flooding is a problem they are facing now and yet they have still not finished rebuilding after the bush fires, less than two year ago.
Australia, a land of contrast; described in Dorothea McKeller’s poem as a ‘land of droughts and flooding rains’. What we are witnessing now is just how closely the extremes our continent experiences often occur consecutively and or in unison, however;
Australia remains the best place in the world to be, doesn’t it Tony Z?