i really agree with your website. I don't know if you will read this the day I typed it but today is the first widespread rain on brisbane (16th of October). Alot-lot-lot of people would REALLY like to have a website with a up-to-date dam percentage section. If it could be updated weekly, great. Updated daily, fantastic. Updated hourly, ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!. thanks for reading

-kamo

I wrote to our local City Councillor after reading the recent BCC water booklet 'Let's Watch Every Drop', and in particular the section 'Ensuring Brisbane's Water Supply'?
I was horrified to notice there was no specific provision for saving, or storing, one more drop of water even though a further million people are due to move into the area within 20 years?
My local councillor advised that creation of any new water storage was the sole perogative of State Government - and they don't seem to be interested.
Perhaps we need a type of 'People's Review Panel' that reviews all government past actions say every five years. Where it was found that governing politicians were aware of a major problem, but made a deliberate decision not to take appropriate action to rectify or moderate same, a deferred financial penalty by way of reducing their generous taxpayer funded pensions should be applied. The pension reduction to be in proportion to the extent of their negligence and the future problem/s caused that should have been foreseen?

Fine article, Hugh, and ditto for the comments. Delighted to find folk who are aware there is a serious water problem here. Please get in touch if you are interested in doing anything I also have a spring and a large dam if it gets dire ...


I sent the letter below to 16 shire councils, also to the Courier Mail. What the Mail did I have no idea. Two mayors and one librarian replied. The librarian made several useful comments, one mayor said thanks and informed all on their council, and our (Pine Shire) also said thanks, then suggested I pass the buck (myself) to Natural Resources, which had already been tried, with no result For that passing on I am indebted to the Premiers Department, which said thanks, but nothing further.


The problem for the frog in the warming pot, is there is no-one to talk to. The "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" has been revised. We know you will not panic. There is no panic button.


Here is the letter, but the paragraph spacings have collapsed and I cannot work out how to attach the rainfall graph to this form. Apologies. Will send on, if amnyone emails or rings.



The Mayor and Councillors,
(-----) Shire Council.


Dear Councillors,

This is about the water crisis and a suggestion to deep drill the Nambour Basin as a matter of urgency. As the Qld Govt. and the BCC are moving very slowly on this if at all, you might like to consider the proposal and then work in concert with the Caboolture and Caloundra shires, if you think it worthwhile and they do also. The Nambour Basin is largely in their shires.

I have a graph of the past Brisbane annual rainfall attached (I hope). As far as I know, CSIRO has not yet gone as far back as 1846 with its annual rainfall records. I managed to do so with much help from state and university librarians some years back, for other purposes. Hence much of the difference in interpretation. You cannot see the long-term trend if you only go back to 1900 or even to 1890, as CSIRO has previously done. There is a regrettable early gap in the record, but I think the data is sufficient for the purpose.

Given the extra data I am not surprised by the present lack of rain; it seemed very likely. That old data suggests this dry spell may well continue, erratically, but for years. The good news is, it will eventually go away if not overwhelmed by global warming.

It may of course rain tomorrow and I sincerely hope it buckets down, but if not and probably anyway, I think we should be drilling flat out in the Nambour Basin now, and I don't think it is happening. There is now perhaps not enough time left to build pipelines or desalination or recycling plants, but I think we could get the bores down and cased in a couple of months, if everyone wakes up. We already have a water problem, and it could get serious. We should perhaps wake up.


I sent the following as an article to Brian Williams of the Courier Mail a few days back, also the regional papers around here. Don’t know if any of them have used it. It is copyleft, so use as you please, if at all.


“The Brisbane water crisis

Brisbane and the surrounding districts are in danger of running clean out of water. If that happens, we will not have power and the sewerage will not work. The city will be largely uninhabitable. As this could be inconvenient, it may be worth considering some of the detail below, and then checking with more competent sources than myself. This is all amateur guesswork, I am not a hydrologist or a geo-hydrologist, merely a geologist. I do not get paid for this theorising by anyone, so I am grinding my own axe here and not anyone else's. I have a spring and a large dam here, but would prefer to keep the water for the fruit trees that feed me and to not have to dole it all out to thirsty friends from Brisbane, if possible. I also quite like ice-cream, and that requires the power stations to have water.

If you think that statement about running out of water is alarmist you are quite right, it is meant to be. It is obviously not possible to see into the future. It may rain hard in the next few days or months and delay the problem for another year or three. But. Take the rainfall records for the city back to 1846, the size of the city now and the limited number of dams. Add the inaction of all levels of government when it comes to either building more dams, piping in water from the rivers to the north and south, or getting a real groundwater drilling program under way. From all that it is clear that we may run out of water.

All levels of government are fully aware and deeply concerned. They have written very detailed and intelligent reports and are writing more. They have spent a lot of money urging everyone to save water. Brisbane City Council is prepared to partially subsidise people buying very small water tanks out of rate refunds. Those two approaches are necessary and have done some good, but they cancel that rather efficiently by refusing to contemplate stopping further industrial and urban development, and so stopping ever more people coming into the city and its surrounding shires. I was told by a Brisbane city councillor that this is a free and democratic society and so stopping people moving here cannot be contemplated. In a free and democratic society, everyone should perhaps have a Rolls-Royce also.

The problem is that we have built a very large and very rich and hence very thirsty city on a very small river catchment. The watershed, the Great Dividing Range, is very close to the coast. Hence the Brisbane River is a short one with a very limited catchment. It starts in the vicinity of Woodford, where in the past rainfall has been fairly high, and then flows south towards the Somerset and Wivenhoe dams through the rain shadow of the D'Aguilar Range. What has happened is that there has not been much rain of late in the vicinity of Woodford. It is not clear why. Many people north of Brisbane consider that either the heat generated by the city, or cooling effect of the Wivenhoe Dam, has caused the storms to change track, and either go towards Ipswich or along the coast. Where I live at Samford, the storms from the south used to come here twenty years ago, but now pass either side, so I am one of those inclined to think there may be some truth there.

Two years back, the rain failed in the early part of the year. Last year, it rained in that period and the dams went up about 30 percent, to 60 percent of their capacity. We are back down at 34 percent, and have been at that level for about three months, as we have had sporadic minor rain. But basically, this year, the rain since March has failed to raise the dam levels. If heavy rain does not come before March (and of course it may) then I estimate we have under a year's supply left. That is not what the government is saying, but we seem to be using one third of the total storage capacity each year. You cannot get every last drop out of a dam, some of the water is un-recoverable, maybe ten percent. So, we may only have about 25 percent of capacity available and even with water saving and sporadic rain, a year or a bit more seems to me a fair estimate. If the taps go dry, a million people or more will have to go elsewhere in a bit of a hurry.

There is a strange irony in this. We are per capita the greatest assaulters of the climate on the planet, as Brisbane is supported and kept rich by the biggest coal export industry in the world. We sell somewhere in the vicinity of 130 million tons of coal for power stations from the Bowen Basin mainly and huge rail and tax revenues come to Brisbane. This year will be the hottest or second hottest in history, worldwide, and seems to be the hottest in Australian history, or close to it. If man-made greenhouse gases are driving that warming, as most met. scientists believe, we are doing our share to help. I am not here blaming others as I have done my bit also, having once worked as a well-paid coal exploration geologist. I am one of those still a bit sceptical that we are driving the whole of the climate change that is clearly happening. This is because the old rainfall records for Brisbane show considerable decade to decade variation in the local annual falls, that cannot have been industrially driven, as they have cycled. I think there is a natural variation that must be added to whatever we have done.

We have a very jumpy rainfall pattern here, year to year, but a long rolling wave to the underlying trend. We can only see one wave, and should pronto do fossil pollen and tree ring studies, if not already done, to see what happened before we started measuring the rainfall directly. That one wave, which may not repeat exactly or even roughly, has a wavelength of about 120 years. If we take the past trough, which was at its lowest from about 1913 to 1920, we will have only 51 percent of the water going into Wivenhoe per year that the planners and builders of that dam assumed. They built it in the seventies when the long wave described was near its peak, as shown by the '74 Brisbane flood. If the period from 1900 to 1940 repeats, we will have 71 percent of the planners' estimated flow into Wivenhoe. The fuss about Wivenhoe is that it holds about 70 percent of the water we catch. The Somerset Dam is merely higher on the same Brisbane River, so the two can be treated as one.

About three months ago I asked all the TV channels, including the ABC, to put the dam levels on daily with the weather report. They all declined, quite understandably, in view of the immense pressure they are under from all the cricket that has to be covered. I think they are slowly starting to report the levels now. I heard one sentence from Channel Ten the other day, for which I would like to extend the grateful thanks of all the people of South East Queensland. You might like to ask them also. If people have an intelligent, day-to-day situation report, they will save more water.

What's to do to get more water? The religious might like to pray to their various sky and thunder gods for rain, but I am sceptical that we can make water come down from the sky even if we lace our prayers with silver iodide. Growing more trees might help, but that takes time. Cutting down less is also a good idea.
But, we can make water come up out of the ground. Over the hill is the biggest underground dam in the world, the Great Artesian Basin. North of Brisbane on the coast is another sedimentary basin, the Nambour Basin. It extends from about the North Pine River to near Eumundi, where it rains a lot. The basin consists of relatively young (Jurassic) sediments and has not been much assaulted by heat or pressure, so its sandstones should contain a lot of water, some of it deep down and hence very clean. If we drill for the deeper aquifers, and those are isolated by impermeable shales from the surface ones, we may be able to get a lot of water out, as a temporary solution, without killing all the trees that live on the shallow groundwater. We may get some compaction, lose a few buildings and damage some roads, judging from what happened when they de-watered the mines west of Johannesburg, but at least clean water will be recovered close to Brisbane.

There is apparently a drilling program underway or planned for the shallow Oxley Creek sediments. I may have it wrong, but I do not think the likely volumes there will help much. We have not left ourselves enough time to build a desalination plant or a major recycling plant, is my guess. We should perhaps be building pipelines to the Tweed and the Mary Rivers, if those have useful amounts of water, but it is not happening.
The state government some years back, in its wisdom, canned the hydrogeology section of the Geological Survey of Queensland; also the coal section, ironically. They have come close to scrapping the entire Geological Survey also, but it survives, just. The hydrogeolgy section of the GSQ should in my opinion, as a matter of extreme urgency, be resuscitated and given all the funding it needs. The old drilling, magnetometry, gravity, hydrology and seismic records should be dug out and thought about. The oil companies may lend some experienced sedimentary geologists if asked nicely. Apart from being good folk, they cannot sell much fuel in empty towns. A major micro-seismics program, over the entire Nambour Basin, should ascertain its depth and the permeability and likely water content of its sediments. At the same time, drilling should start, with perhaps ten rigs working, preferably more. To establish a major well-field takes time and that we may not have in quantity. I put all these suggestions to the Premier's department more than a month ago, also to the Deputy Mayor of Brisbane, the major being un-contactable as he does not have an email address and is always very busy. The Premier's department acknowledged and said they had forwarded my letter to the Minister of Natural Resources. Councillor Hinchliffe also acknowledged, and said I could perhaps address the council, at the time set aside for members of the public to do so. I have not yet done that.

I do not know, along with the rest of general public, what has been done so far, to secure real and significant new water resources for Brisbane and the south east of Queensland.

We will have to stop further development and the flow of people into SEQ. People from elsewhere will have to be satisfied, as the Fijians say, with being honoured guests and not residents. If we start to live on groundwater, we should realise that is a declining capital resource, if over-mined. We should I suggest maintain tight restrictions on water use, permanently and shift our gardening habits towards more drought-tolerant plants, and towards more food plants rather than decorations. This is a very big city, on a very short river, on the driest continent after Antarctica.

Peter Ravenscroft
Closeburn."

Phone 07 3289 4470 Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
2 January, 2006.

i think that you have very good points but we have to make an effort too.

helo is anybody there.......HELLO uh it's no use this place is old i'm outta here.