Could the floods have been prevented?

A letter from an Australian poster on James Delingpole’s blog.

>I am sitting here in my home in South East Queensland, watching the news come in about the flooding everywhere. Entire suburbs around Brisbane and several smaller towns are either isolated by flood-waters or have been evacuated. Highways are cut everywhere.
People have been dying. So far about 20 people have died in the past week – nine just this morning when a deluge went through the Lockyer Valley. Most of them children. Another 70 are missing. One could put it all down to “just” weather.
Except EXACTLY the same floods occurred in EXACTLY the same places back in 1974, with much the same tragic loss of life and destruction of property.
Back then we weren’t nearly as clever and learned as you think yourselves to be today. Back then we had this silly notion that climate was cyclical, and if we didn’t prepare for it, we would have a repeat of the same tragedies to deal with in “about thirty years”. That was the thinking of the scientists back then – that climate went in roughly thirty year cycles.
Flood mitigation programs were planned. A series of levee banks and diversionary dams would be built. Brisbane and SE QLD would NEVER suffer such devastation again. After all, we had thirty years to plan and build and improve.
And that’s what we did – or at least started. Wivenhoe Dam got built as the first step, but by the time it was finished clever people like you lot who “knew” that such things were never going to happen again had taken over. CO2 AGW madness had already taken hold.
Instead we had “post modern” minds like Tim Flannery “advising” the government that because of Anthropogenic Global Warming, SE QLD would be perpetually in drought from then on. “Forget dams and flood mitigation programs”, intoned the wise Dr Tim – “build desalination plants instead”.
So that’s what our government did. And that is why thirty five years later, we are once again suffering exactly the SAME tragic loss of life and destruction of property, pretty-much exactly where, and when, and how, those stupid scientists who foolishly believed climate was cyclical had predicted.
Meanwhile our billion dollar desalination plant is quietly being mothballed, and emergency crews are frantically trying to work out how they might be able to save nineteen thousand homes from destruction in the next couple of days, as the Lockyer deluge hits Brisbane. Wise Dr Tim Flannery has been made ‘Australian of the Year” for his contributions.
I google on the internet for climate extremes and climate-related disasters in the 1972 – 1979 period – the period of the last transition in the natural weather cycle, and I find that it wasn’t a good period in many places around the world. Record and near record high – and low temperatures, record and near-record precipitation, and so on. Floods and droughts pretty-much mimicking what is happening now, and in pretty-much the same places.
I also noted that the indicators of the “silly” theory of the cyclical nature , ocean and atmospheric, are pretty much exactly as they are now.
I have to admit it could all get a bit depressing. But then I remember that the world is in the capable hands of much cleverer people than those silly scientists back in the Seventies who believed climate was cyclical. Now the decisions are being made by clever people like Dr Tim Flannery
– and you.
That is when I weep for my fellow Man.<

39 thoughts on “Could the floods have been prevented?”

  2. We can all be wise after the event but I believe there to be a lot of truth and good common sense in this letter from another site. All the grief hoares who have made very good livings out of selling the world on climate change will just shrug their shoulders and say ‘wild card, just one of those things’.

  9. I would have thought that building dams would have been a good idea particularly if long spells of drought were predicted.

  10. We did build the Wivenhoe dam, that’s why Brisbane’s not already under water. It’s the rest of the infrastructure that got shelved.

  13. The footage on the news just now was just awful and it’s difficult to grasp the fact that a landmass the size of Germany and France put together is now just covered in water. Just got to hope that the dam continues to do the job.

  15. The Mary River Dam would not have been built in time to deal with this lot. As far as I recall, there was no mention of it being part of any flood control plan.

    Unfortunately, our government has swallowed the AGW myth whole, so I doubt that there will be any thought of resurrecting the scheme.

  16. janh1 :

    The footage on the news just now was just awful and it’s difficult to grasp the fact that a landmass the size of Germany and France put together is now just covered in water. Just got to hope that the dam continues to do the job.

    I gather that the authorities are going to open the floodgates of the Wivenhoe dam which will add to the flooding in Brisbane. Dams can only do so much. They cannot be allowed to breach.

  17. Water has been being released from the Wivenhoe dam all through this… as it has from all the dams around Brisbane. If it hadn’t the dams would have overflowed into the surrounding areas.

    Last bit of information was that the Wivenhoe was letting two Sydney Harbours worth of water through a day and straight out to sea. But, it now has to deal with the water coming in from the Lokyer Valley (Toowoomba area) and elsewhere – and it just isn’t going to cope.

    Parts of Brisbane are already under water, and people are being urged not to go into the city. Not much point since the electricity will be cut from 8.30 to large parts of the city.

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/stay-out-of-brisbane-cbd-police-say/story-fn3dxity-1225986006496

    http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/brisbane-cbd-faces-early-morning-blackout/story-e6freoof-1225985862669

    The Brisbane river is supposed to peak tomorrow and there is a king tide which will exacerbate the problems.

    Oddly enough, at the moment I am looking out to a blue sky with, admittedly large, white clouds…

  18. Both France and Germany are, coincidentally, suffering from floods just now, though nothing as horrific as in Australia.

  19. In an interview on TV this morning, Kevin Rudd was asked whether more dams would have alleviated the flooding. Rudd’s constituency is in one of the Brisbane suburbs affected by flooding.

    As he rightly said, this was not an appropriate time to be asking such questions and he wasn’t ‘going there’. But, he added, he would be asking plenty of questions later.

  20. Here’s a story from today’s Australian – looks as if it’s recycled (from 2003?), but raises some questions anyway.

    Alarming report on Brisbane River risks covered up

    “The major finding of this study is that the calculated one-in-100-year design flood flow . . . is about 1m to 2m higher than the current development control in the Brisbane River corridor. The simple option of saying that the current development control level represents the one-in-100-year flood level is not valid.”

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/alarming-report-on-risks-covered-up/story-e6frg6nf-1225986634328

  21. They did know there would be another flood, they did expect it and only a short while ago, and I mean only months ago, they had a flood disaster plan prepared, but they never implemented any of the recommendations put forth. Why? because the AGW boys argued black and blue that it would never happen and the plans were shelved.

    Meanwhile watch the AGW boys at work trying to fix it all up so they don’t look so bad, read this guy glorifying himself

    http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/drowning-in-a-hothouse-20110113-19pr1.html

  26. Good to see you here Donald! Hang around!

    No one seems to take note of the cyclical nature of weather patterns any more. I have the notion that it’s all to do with the idea that mankind can do anything and the culture of ‘someone has to be at fault’. Hence the AGW theories of “It’s all our fault and we can change it.”

    No – we can’t change climatic cycles – but we can build (or not build!) ways to ameliorate the problems that the weather patterns throw up.

    I would like to add here, that, quite regardless of whether the floods could have been avoided, I’ve been impressed with the way the floods in Brisbane have been dealt with. Anna Bligh has worked tirelessly. There has been real information provided – none of the “She’ll be right” b**t.

  28. Julia has been useless, coming across as a schoolmistress with no connection to the realities of life. She’s done herself political harm from her grandstanding, whereas Anna’s done herself a power of good. Which says a lot – her stock was rock-bottom after the Rail privatisation.

  29. I dare say Julia best show her good side from now on, thinking about it I think this emergency will show the best and worst of Australian politics soon enough.

  33. It strikes me as a shame that the human race in modern times has ignored the reasons why our forefathers did not settle in many places which, cyclically, have suffered from natural disasters. The poor people of Brazil are now the victims too.

  34. Janus, I am not sure what you mean by modern times, but people have been migrating for ever. Does not every region of the world have its own disasters? Even the Rift Valley, from whence we are supposed to have originated, suffers from floods, famine and drought. Despite the disaster in Queensland, people are still better off there than in many other locations which were inhabited by ‘our forefathers’. The thing is to recognise that disasters will happen and prepare for them. Think of the Thames Barrier and the dykes of the Netherlands. Or even tsunami warning devices.

  35. It’s an inconvenient truth for the grief mongers of climate change to own up to the fact that signing up for their flawed agenda enables many governments and authorities to save shed loads of tax dollars by not building dams etc as ‘the statistics show that floods will not happen again the way they did in the 70s’
    I trust that the debate will start soon in Queensland and these prats are shown up for what they are, self serving, venal, money grabbing barstewards.

  37. Thanks for that Boa and your kind remarks about my comment on your blog. Anna Bligh is a top lady and someone I would want on my side in adversity, I echo her words, said with feeling and passion and get to think that I may well be looking at a future Prime Minister, may she go from strength to strength.

  38. Just a thought, I wonder if the flood mitigation plans will now be implemented – and how much extra it’s going to cost because of the delay, (and the changed conditions, like houses being built in potential harm’s way?)

  39. Who knows. If the AGW mob get their way nothing will be done, and it’ll all happen again in around 30 years time… with even more disastrous results because there’ll be even more people and more houses in vulnerable areas.

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