UPDATES ADDED: See updates below the read more line
My heart goes out to Australia. The ugly side of this is that a portion of the tragedy may have been prevented with a dam to control floodwaters. But as James Delinpole writes:
Were it not for the actions of Environment Minister Peter Garrett, for example, the Queensland town of Gympie would not now be underwater. Unfortunately, Garrett took it upon himself to block the proposed dam that would have prevented it.
To add insult to injury, the state run warning system sent warning messages out six hours after the flood engulfed homes. – Anthony
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The disaster is extraordinary:
THE nation confronts its worst flood disaster in living memory, with 30 people believed dead and 90 missing in southeast Queensland.
The wall of water bearing down on Brisbane threatens to engulf thousands of homes and put more people at risk.
What I cannot understand is this: how was the possibility of such a danger not forseen, when climate experts and the Government claim they can predict the climate 100 years from now? How did this week’s rain come as such a surprise, when we now spend billions more on computer models predicting the future?
Some of the stories are tragic:
A three-year-old boy drowned at Ipswich, after floodwaters pulled him from his mother’s arms.
Sarah Norman yesterday told how her brother Sam punched a hole in the laundry ceiling and pushed their sister Victoria, 15, to safety after water flooded the brick home at noon on Monday.
“He went back to get Mum and Dad, but they had just gone. Victoria heard Mum scream,” Ms Norman said.
Steve Matthews, 56, an electrician and former pastor and his wife Sandy, 46, a teacher’s aide from Spring Bluff near Murphys Creek near Toowoomba, were found dead downstream on Monday afternoon.
UPDATE
How amazingly fast the floodwaters rose in Toowoomba.
UPDATE 2
The global warmists claimed Queensland’s rains would dry up, which is why the Labor Government built a desalination plant – now mothballed – instead of yet more dams:
(Premier Peter) Beattie said the effects of climate change on our region meant we could no longer rely on past rainfall patterns to help us plan for the future…
“My advice indicates if we continue to experience below average rainfalls it could take several years (anywhere from five to ten years) for our major dam system to climb back up past 40 percent even with purified recycled water, desalination and the other measures we’re taking to supplement our water supplies.
“Given the current uncertainty about the likely impact of climate change on rainfall patterns in SEQ over coming years, it is only prudent to assume at this stage that lower than usual rainfalls could eventuate.
But Heather Brown, a Toowoomba resident, says locals made other bad choices in the same mistaken belief that floods would not come:
Tragically, it seems some of the most basic rules of survival – and certainly the most elementary rule of town planning – were forgotten in the case of Toowoomba, a city that is dissected by East Creek and West Creek, two deceptively innocent looking little creeks that seem to run as much water as a decent suburban gutter for most of the year.
Admittedly, Toowoomba – Australia’s Garden City – has been battling drought for almost a decade… Along the way, the creeks have been prettied and preened and slotted into your typical modern urban plan. And the breadth of their flow – and their seminal right to a small flood plain – has been gradually stolen away.
At the intersections of Victoria, Margaret and Russell streets – where the boiling muddy tsunami was its fiercest and most graphically filmed – the city council had embarked on an ambitious beautification plan to turn the creek into a pleasing urban feature, complete with boardwalks, gardens, illumination and seating. Everyone thought it was wonderful, except for cynics such as my husband and me. In fact, every time we drove past the feature we would say to no one in particular: This little creek is going to make them sorry one day. Tragically, we were right.
Early yesterday morning I went back to the bruised and battered Margaret Street to support any local business that still had the heart to open. My coffee shop was handing out free coffees to the battered owners of the local businesses who had lost so much. When I went to buy my newspaper, the newsagent told me he was devastated, not because of what had happened but because the engineer who had worked on the beautification project told him he couldn’t make them listen when he pleaded for bigger pipes – “18-footers” he called them – to let the water through, because it simply didn’t suit the aesthetics of the architects and landscapers.
So that’s what happened to my city, folks, the same as happened to so much of flooded Queensland. We did stupid and really, really dumb things because we thought we could get away with them. We built the wrong sort of houses and the wrong sort of bridges. We built towns and suburbs on flood plains. And we ignored at our peril the forces of nature and the history of the great floods that have shaped this continent for thousands of years.
Read more at Andrew Bolt
UPDATE: The Herald Sun has a broad coverage Flood News Page here
UPDATE2: For some background on the Mary River dam that James Delingpole refers to there’s this entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveston_Crossing_Dam
The question is whether it was more important to save fish or to protect people. From the Wiki article there’s this:
A University of Technology, Sydney report stated that “the proposed Traveston Dam near Gympie could pump up to 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere each year” and “even desalination, itself a last resort in a severe drought, would result in fewer emissions at 280,000 to 350,000 (annual tonnes) to yield the same quantity of water”.[10]
They apparently went with the desalinization plant, now mothballed. It seems that AGW gets into every discussion, even dams. The question has been raised as to whether or not this damn could have saved these people. I don’t know that it would or wouldn’t, but it would seem to me that more storage upstream helps in both times of drought and flood.
If it turns out that the dam would have made a difference, I hope that Environment Minister Peter Garrett will be in a public enquiry, so that people who have suffered in this tragedy can express their grief. Politicians need to hear that such actions have consequences. This isn’t the first time environmental issues have been blamed in Australian natural disasters. See this previous WUWT article on what people went through with the brush fires.
Superstition wins over historical data.
Anthony said: How did this week’s rain come as such a surprise, when we now spend billions more on computer models predicting the future?
Peter Maddock said: The floods are truly tragic … but remain weather, and terrible floods are part of our (Australian) history and folk law.
Climate scientists and the people who hang on their every word and mash it into public policy have become utterly blinkered on climate at the expense of weather. They have a tunnel vision for averages and no longer seem to consider the extremes and the work that needs to be done to prepare for them.
Human settlements have always been vulnerable to extremes of weather, climate doesn’t have extremes it is an accumulated average. Weather kills people, climate doesn’t. Our representatives have become absorbed by a hysteria for something that to a practical extent is irrelevant to our daily lives.
REPLY: Read carefully, That is Andrew Bolts column excerpts. -Anthony
Not unusual that the city planners don’t listen to the engineers. And it is going to get worse as the infrastructure built in the 60’s and 70’s ends its useful life and must be replaced when local governments are “in the hole”.
My apologies. I hadn’t realised with my earlier comments that I was quoting Andrew Bolt’s article. While I sometimes agree with his positions, I rarely agree with the hyperbole he uses, and this was just another example of that.
Much as I love to stick the boot into Eco-nuts, it’s completely wrong to think the traveston crossing dam wouldnhave done anything. Every single dam in the region was 100% full prior to the large rainfall event. It’s been raining heavily for months so even a new damnwould have been already been full. The traveston crossing dam was a political folly- a gIgantic white elephant of a dam located for political reasons rather than choosing the best location. Yes, it got killed over environmental reasons but it should never have made it past the soil tests. It’s tempting to try and pin the blame on greenies but in this case it’s just weather, and a grim reminder that this beautiful part of the world sometimes floods in remarkable ways.
I have some queries regarding the Wivenhoe Dam and the flooding..
how much of the total catchment of the lower Brisbane River comes from the dam?
could they have made sure the dam was nearly ’empty’ before the arrival of the rains to ensure it captured and stored some of the precipitation?
It just strikes me as odd that the dam is being overtopped and perhaps this could have been better planned and reduced the lower flooding?
Anyway, I hope the folk of Queensland struggle on and wish them well in their toils.
RE: David – UK
To my knowledge only one “climate scientist” in Australia (David Karoly) has come out to say this is all due to global warming but the media aren’t really knocking his door down. In this continent people have been programmed to equate warming with drought so the press aren’t having too much to do with it so far. This type of rain was meant to be a thing of the past and the usual opportunists have been pretty muted.
This is what happens when greenies influence politicians. Hope Aussies can sue idiots in both those categories.
I am truly sorry.
I will switch to Australian wine as my patriotic duty to Oz.
http://www.woopwoop.com.au/
PS–I don’t lose any love on that expensive desalinization plant that was built either. So their water bills will always be increasing to pay for that multi-billion project, all because of scary AGW water shortage models.
It only takes millions to build a desalinization plant in Texas. And it’s probably bigger than theirs.
The lives lost in Toowoomba (which is also where most of the missing persons are also reported) was due to localised flash flooding so much of the hype about dams in this instance is lost.
Many of those who lost their lives were also those before the flooding in Toowoomba struck, these were the many who crossed flooded creeks and bridges of which 10 or so lost their lives doing so. They took their lives (and at times their loved ones) in their own hands as well as putting emergency services lives at risk already stretched in resources.
There is a contrast though. The Prime Minister Julia Gillard is a chameleon, stands looking fresh, impecably dressed with perfect make-up and hair. Next to her and he well rested self is the Premier of Queensland Anna Bligh, who is haggard and withdrawn, she is dressed in a simple and ruffled button-up blue shirt eyes bloodshot with little make-up and hair ruffled. This is also the contrast in words they say, while Gillard is full of false words spoken by a used-car salesman (or what one seems to assume they speak) Bligh has been quick and continual in giving people updates via the television. Her work has been tireless and for all I have disliked about her government I would like to give her credit for the effort she and her team have given in this crisis.
Has anyone heard from David Archibald?
[snip – juvenile humor and unwarranted in the face of this tragedy]
Never let a good crisis go to waste, right? See here.
Cheers,
Simon, ACM
Guys back off on this one. Trust me. I live in the area impacted and have followed the weather event that caused this flooding closely since it originated on Saturday. My home has been impacted by these floodwaters.
The rainfall we have had in SE QLD is unprecedented in our history. I’ve seen flood peaks upstream and rainfall rates that I never imagined I would see. Previous record peaks in a number of areas have been broken by 1-2 meters.
There is only so much a dam can do. No dam would have prevented the loss of life in Toowoomba where the rainfall rate hit 300mm/h in an half hour period. The cell that produced this particular burst of rain had less than half an hour earlier been nowther near as severe. This phenomenal rainfall sent a wall of water down the Lockyer Valley which no one could have predicted. There were some guys on our weather zone forums that suggested that flash flooding might be a problem in Toowomba but this was no more than half an hour to an hour before it actually ocurred.
As it stands, what has saved Brisbane from a far greater catastrophe is the flood mitigation capacity at Wivenhoe Dam which in this instance may well have handled a once in 200 year flood event and massively reduced the impact.
I haven’t read Andrew Bolt’s article but if he’s blaming Peter Garrett (a labor MP) he needs to pull his head in. I’ve got a great deal of respect for a lot of what he writes, but he is a staunch liberal supporter and if he is indulging in misguided political finger pointing at this tragic time then his behavious is sickening (and I’m a liberal voter btw)
This whole tragic event is nothing to do with climate change. It is a freak rainfall event which was in no way ever going to be fully mitigated by any attempt by authorities to control the floodwaters.
Wasn’t there a massive death count just a few years back when bush fires rean amok because the greenies have outlawed any brush clearing, even on private property?
Seems that Queensland, especially around Brisbane and Rockhampton are prone to severe flooding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1893_Black_February_flood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockhampton,_Queensland
Both cities expanded rapidly after WWII, with extensive urban sprawl into the flood plains around the Brisbane and Fitzroy Rivers, respectively, resulting in ever worstening flood disasters. We have done exactly the same thing in N Yorkshire, the Midlands and Cumbria.
Brc says:
January 12, 2011 at 2:23 pm
you say every dam was full beforehand? Is that true? If so, why were dams not allowed to discharge ‘more’ to accommodate new rainfall?
I don’t want to be finger pointing, but if lessons cannot be learnt without knowing the facts.
A acquaintance of mine works for SE Queensland Water. He agrees with ScottR’s comments about the suitability of damming the Mary River at the proposed site. It was a silly, politically motivated idea which most hydrologists disagreed with.
Mr Bolt’s comments are both wrong and wrong headed, as well as being factually incomplete. For those not familiar with the geography of the flooding ares, he leaves the impression that several of the events were interconnected, when they were not.
This piece is not Mr Bolt’s best work, but rather among his worst.
“REPLY: Read carefully, That is Andrew Bolts column excerpts. -Anthony”
My apologies Anthony.
Kev-in-UK.
Wivenhoe is designed to go to 200%-225% (25% is the ‘uncontrolled level’ or something). In other words the first approximately 100% is dam catchment and the other 100% is flood mitigation. Since it hasn’t reached 200% yet this indicates that the dam has done is job well. It feeds in below Ipswich too I believe so the levels of 19m there are not the result of the feed from Wivenhoe. There is no major dam directly to the west of Ipswich to my knowledge.
http://www.seqwater.com.au/public/dam-levels/interactive-map
Ipswich is south of Lake Manchester but in line with Bill Gunn dam (roughly). Brisbane is East-North-East of Ipswich.
This is nonsense. The math is quite simple.
Q = I – dS/dt where Q is outflow, I is inflow and S is storage. There is no flood attenuation when the storage is full (dS/dt = 0 and Q = I) . Wivenhoe Dam above Brisbane has been at 200% capacity for days and is providing no protection against todays flood peak.
Moreover, I live in Queensland and I find it appallingly insensitive to be making foolish political points at this time.
Stupidity is not unique to Australia. How many Americans live within five miles of the Californian coast and within a 20 feet from sea level?
How many Canadians do the same in Vancouver?
It is called gambling. One day their number will come up. It is not a matter of IF but simply a matter of WHEN.
One thing that stood out for me…
Why do they not listen to the engineers?
DaveE.
No doubt there are knowledgeable civil engineers/hydrologists that are followers of WUWT that can set the record straight. But from the limited understanding of an electrical the value of a dam fitted with flood gates in mitigating the flow of flood waters does not necessarily cease when the dam reaches it’s nominal 100% capacity. We commonly hear of dams holding water way above nominal full capacity i.e. the case in point. Presumably this comes from the raised maximum water level that comes with raising flood gates. Obviously the more the flood gates are lifted/opened the greater the volume of water spilled. However if we see the water contained by the dam increase rapidly from say 100% to say 180% during flood inflow conditions, then surely at the very least 80% more water is being held back than would otherwise be the case if the dam just spilled all water in excess of the 100% level. Maybe what we see then is a retarding/smoothing of the maximum river flows below the dam?
“Australia’s coal-fired power plants consume around 2 tonnes of water – for cooling and steam generation – for every megawatt-hour they produce.”
Flannery actually said that? In that case he is remarkably ignorant. Steam generation consumes zero water since it is a completely closed system, the same water is used over and over again. Cooling may consume some water if it run as a “closed” system with cooling towers since there will some evaporation. If water from the sea or a lake is used for cooling the consumption is essentially zero there too.