Wivenhoe management now a joke.
The recent news that the Bligh government has decided we should limit the storage at Wivenhoe dam to 75% of its intended capacity should be all the proof you need that the current government has no idea how to manage anything. Lets take a moment to spell it out so Anna can understand;
Floods happen. It doesn’t matter what you do with Wivenhoe, every so often we are going to have a flood. By all means do things to help lessen the impact, but dumping our water supply shouldn’t be one of them.
Improve infrastructure so when released from Wivenhoe are necessary, they can be carried out immediately and quickly. The reason why we don’t flush the excess water out of Wivenhoe in a big hurry when it does overfill is because we wash out vital road links across the Brisbane river. If we simply put a bridge across where the Moggill ferry now is, and raised colleges crossing a few metres, we could let the excess capacity (that is, over 100%) go more quickly, because there would be less consequences down stream.
Educate the public. Too many people didn’t realise they were going to be completely inundated. Leaders kept saying it was another 1974 flood, but plenty of new home owners and business owners are only in their thirties, so have no idea what that means. You have flood maps, you have computers, why not just send a letter to every home and business once every five years and tell them what the flood risk is at their property? You waste enough money on other things, this would at least be helpful.
Build some sensible infrastructure. Why did we have ferry terminals that ended up destroyed in the flood? Why did we build river walk and then watch it tear free and float out to sea? We have plenty of great engineers in this state, lets have them draw up plans for riverside developments that are build to accomodate the occasional flood, so we don’t have to spend millions of dollars replacing them.
Okay, I’ve digressed a little, but the point of this post is to draw attention to the knee jerk reaction to flush our drinking water down the river, because the Premier believes there are enough voters who will think this is a good idea to win votes in the early election she is almost certain to call. It’s all very cynical, and one can only hope when the next election does roll around, we end up with a better government that this one.