More Australian Towns Running Out Of Water

Town Water Supplies Being Diverted To Farms And Mines To Save Local Jobs

Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney are running out of water. The majority of dam levels for all four cities are falling to lows not seen for three or four decades. But Australian cities are not yet completely dry. The same, however, can't be said for more and more rural and outback towns. From my own research - there aren't any official figures - at least 20 towns with populations of 800 to 2000 people in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have only one to four weeks worth of locally sourced fresh, drinkable water left. A few days of good rains will help, but months of regular rains are needed now, and no long-term forecasters are expecting such rains in the immediate future.

From the Sun Herald :

A number of outback NSW towns will run out of drinking water within weeks and be forced to truck it in, officials have warned.

Tilpa, on the Darling River, is no longer pumping water from the river for drinking and is relying on the last reserves in domestic rainwater tanks and bottled water.

General manager of Central Darling Shire Council Bill O'Brien said Wilcannia, once the third largest inland port in Australia, would have no water left in its weir in about a month and would have to switch to using salty bore water.

"The alternative was to try to buy water from Menindee, if any was available, and truck it in tankers over 165 kilometres of dirt roads at a cost of about $25,000 a week," Mr O'Brien said.

At Ivanhoe, which normally gets its water from the Lachlan River, bores are being used. Drinking water at White Cliffs is coming from rainwater tanks.

Mr O'Brien said the wellbeing of several thousand people living on the Darling and Lachlan was at risk because of continuing upstream water allocations for agriculture.

Tensions are increasing in these towns as they watch their water supplies being diverted to other "priorities", be they farms, towns facing more dire water shortages, or local industry.

And this is where the harshest choices of all will likely have to made.

Towns need drinking water, but do you shut off water to the local farms, thereby cutting back on crop yields and seeing job losses follow?

A local publican at Tilba reckons they've got only a week of water left. He drains water from the tanks at a local medical clinic, and 'trucks' it back to his pub on his motorcycle to fill the hotel's coffee urn.

Orange is home to thousands of people, and the local goldmine provides jobs for more than 500, as well as helping the local businesses and the community in general to stay alive.

But the Cadia goldmine needs water :

Council staff have endorsed the request for emergency water supplies to prevent the mine's closure, saving at least 500 jobs.

If the recommendation is adopted, water will be provided on a monthly basis and limited to five megalitres a day.

To save the local jobs, and the local economy, water that would go to homes has to go to local industry. It's a massive Catch 22 for all concerned.

If the jobs dry up, as the water supply dries up, how will people be able to stay in these towns, when there is both no jobs and little or no water?

Both the federal government and the opposition government are making big promises about rolling out rebates so that just about every Australian family can install a rainwater tank at home. But unlike the cities, many Australian rural and outback towns never got rid of their rainwater tanks, and they're still just about out of water.

Anyone know any good rain dances?

The "Armageddon Solution" To Mega-Drought - Two Queensland Towns May Have To Evacuated

When Australian Cities Run Out Of Water, Will They Have To Be Evacuated?

Pray For Rain : Melbourne Running Out Of Water, Dam Levels At 40 Year Lows

Aborigines Use Ancient Weather Forecasting Methods To Predict Coming Rains

For more than 60,000 years, Australian Aborigines have been reading the land, the clouds, the stars, the plants and the animals to predict how the cycles of nature would affect their hunting and gathering in the season ahead.

Using that ancient knowledge, some of the world's longest surviving cultured people are seeing a bit of good news in the natural world for some areas of Australia devastated by mega-drought.

So don't start evacuating the cities just yet, drought breaking rains might not be as far away as previously thought :

With wattle trees blooming across southeastern Australia and native birds and cockatoos on the wing, Aboriginal weather watchers say rain is on the way – giving some hope to parts of the country ravaged by drought.

"The cockys are flocking everywhere. That's usually a good sign that rain is coming," said Jeremy Clark, from Victoria.

"The way the flora and plants and shrubs are starting to react, I'd certainly be expecting rain."

For the first time, the forecasts from Clark's Brambuk community, which covers five Aboriginal homelands, are being taken seriously by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology as it looks for different ways to better understand the changing climate.

Bureau climate meteorologist Harvey Stern said the traditional Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring seasons have little relevance in Australia's tropical north – or even in the temperate south, where aborigines have six seasons based on the weather and changes to the natural environment.

The bureau's Indigenous Weather Knowledge programme taps into the Aboriginal philosophy that all of nature is connected, and subtle changes to plants and animals can give clues about the climate and weather.

Mr Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk community which covers most of western Victoria, including the Grampians mountains and national park, said Aborigines have always had different ways of looking at the weather, reading landscape rather than a calendar.

"It's still practised. We won't go fishing for eels, for example, until wattles start flowering and the animals start moving, and the full moon comes. Then you know the eels are running on the migratory journey to the sea," he said.

Australia Faces World's Most Extreme "Climate Change Challenge"

Two Australian Cities Face Ruin Without Rain

How Long Before The Mass Evacuation Of Cities Begin?

How dry does an Australian city or major town have to get before the state and federal governments consider mass evacuations?

The evacuation of the entire human population, by force, of at least two Queensland towns is now on its way to becoming a reality. It sounds like hype, but it's not, read the truth for yourself here.

But what about the bigger towns? What if an entire city of a million or more Australians ran utterly dry of drinking water supplies?

What then?

Without fresh water, any large town or city becomes uninhabitable. You simply cannot truck in enough water to keep a city of a million or more people alive.

The Queensland town of Killarney currently has its drinking water trucked in, at a cost of some $8000 per week. Eight grand a week for a town of less than 2000 people. What dry city could afford an 'imported' water bill clocking up a few million dollars a week?

If the Australian government was eventually forced to evacuate a city like Adelaide or Brisbane, where would all those people go to? There's not a lot of room in the other Australian cities. They're all experiencing, or facing, water shortages of their own. And once you get out of the city and their suburbs, the vast majority of Australia is already suffering scary to shitscary levels of drought.

If we can't pack off the millions of residents of Adelaide and Brisbane to somewhere else in Australia, we're going to have to look overseas.

How about Canada? They're looking for a few hundred thousand new immigrants in the next few years. But be warned 'exported' Queenslanders, it's mighty cold in Alberta, where all the new jobs in the shale-into-oil industries are waiting to be filled. Pack your woollies.

Of course, all these Australian climate change refugees might find a new home in the rapidly melting lands of the Arctic. The ice-free Arctic coastlines of Canada, the US, Russia and Greenland are going to be the new homelands for tens of millions of climate change refugees in the coming decades.

The bizarre irony of Australians possibly being forced to evacuate their towns and cities due to the severe effects of climate change is that Australians were recently debating whether or not we should welcome the expected human tide of climate change refugees from the islands of the South Pacific, some of which are already being consumed by rising sea levels.

How hardcore climate change effects Australia is likely to only get more weird, from here on in.

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According to this international news story, Australian Of The Year Tim Flannery, the superbly apocalyptic Climate Change Voice Of Doom, is "the country's most recognised scientist".

Well, maybe. He's certainly Australia's most recognised Australian Of The Year.

According to Flannery, who tends to beef up his Voice Of Doom when speaking to journalists on the international beat :

Australia faces the world's most extreme climate change challenge as millions of city dwellers try to cope with water shortages, according to the country's most recognised scientist.

Flannery said the drought meant two of Australia's largest cities, Brisbane and Adelaide -- home to a combined total of almost three million people -- would run out of water by the year's end unless the so-called "Big Dry" ended.

"We could see a catastrophic situation developing here by the end of the year. It's become a huge issue," Flannery told AFP.

"Even a year ago this would have been unthinkable. I think it's the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now.

"We have a situation where, if there are no flows in the Murray-Darling (river system), Adelaide, a city of one million people, has only 40 days' worth of water left in storage.

"If we don't get any rain this year Adelaide and Brisbane may be facing diabolical problems."

Catastrophic situation? Diabolical problems? Cut all the soft talk and sugar-spin, Flannery, and tell the bowel-loosening truth : If it doesn't rain in volumes that would have made Noah hire on extra ark builders, Adelaideans are going to be evicted from the city and packed off to the colds of Canada, via cruise ship.

Nobody wants to be the first to say it, but now I've said it. It's done, there you go. So deal with it, Adelaide, or start towing Antarctican icebergs into your ports.

It's always interesting to take a look at the international media stories on how Australia is being hammered by climate change, and the subsequent water shortages, crumbling coast lines, destroyed crops and mega-drought. They don't tend to hold back on the heavy stuff like the local media does.

There was a spectacularly doom-laden feature in the UK Independent a few weeks back, which I sat down to read after I finished liberally hosing off the path, wastefully washing the car, filling the swimming pool, flushing the toilet repeatedly to get rid of a fly that was doing laps in the bowl, and turning on the front and back lawn sprinklers for four or five hours, not because the grass was dying, but just because I love the way the sunlight glistens in all that watery spray.

If it's good enough for key members of the Australian media and the federal government to be deniers of global warming and climate change, then I can be a water-shortage denier.

And so much for all that.

But seeing a point-by-point mini-history of how the mega-drought and water shortages have impacted Australia in the past couple of years can make for some pretty freaky reading, even more so if you live in a city or town where water shortages have already hit hard :

The drought, which has lasted a decade in parts of the country, has slowed Australia's overall economic growth by an estimated 0.75 percent as crops have fallen 62 percent.

The impact on rural communities has been devastating. Many farmers have been forced off the land and counselling services have reported unusually high levels of suicide in rural areas.

Children have water conservation messages drummed into them from an early age at school and householders face hefty fines, or can even have their water disconnected, if they are found to be wasting the precious resource.

The government is also concerned that Australia's tourism industry, which earns billions of dollars a year, will be hit by "jet guilt" -- a reluctance by holidaymakers to take the heavily polluting, long-haul plane flights that are the only practical way to reach Down Under.

Authorities are also considering culling some of the million-plus feral camel population after dromedaries "mad with thirst" rampaged through a remote desert community.

Researchers warn the drought could drive Australia's iconic koalas to extinction within a decade.

The scale of the problem hit home for many Australians in April when Prime Minister John Howard said there would be no water for farms in the Murray-Darling river basin unless the drought broke soon.

Covering more than one million square kilometres (400,000 square miles) in the southeast of Australia, the Murray-Darling basin is the country's largest river system, almost three times bigger than Japan and four times larger than Britain.

It is Australia's rural powerhouse, producing more than 40 percent of the nation's agricultural produce, worth 10 billion dollars (8.3 billion US) a year.

The Murray-Darling supports half the nation's sheep flock, a quarter of the cattle herd and three-quarters of irrigated land.

It's clearly time to evacuate the residents of Brisbane and Adelaide to the wilds of Canada and divert their fresh water river flows to Sydney and Melbourne, where they are needed most.

The Brisbanians and Adelaiders won't be happy, but harsh sacrifices must be made in such times of national emergency. Sydneysiders and Melbournians will appreciate the sacrifices made by their fellow Australians. We might even send these new Canastralians a post card, or two, but only if they ship back an ice berg or two, if there's any left by then.


Prime Minister Says "Pray For Rain", Renowned Priest Says Begging God To Stop The Drought Is "Pointless"

Melbourne Also Running Out Of Water - Vegetable Crops Production To Drop By Two-Thirds

Australia's Mega-Drought To Cripple Local Food Supply

The "Armageddon Solution" To Water Shortages - Start Evacuation Of Queensland Towns

Towns May Be Evacuated Over Water Shortages

The "Armageddon Solution" To The Australian Mega-Drought

1800 Australians may be forcibly removed from their homes in two Queensland towns as councils and state governments consider increasingly drastic measures to cope with the worst drought in Australia's recorded history.

Disturbingly, Killarney, one of the towns that may be "evacuated", is situated near the source of the Murray-Darling river system : the essential water system that stretches through three Australian states and is now drying up, and has completely stopped flowing in dozens of locations.

Drinking water is being trucked into Killarney at a cost of $8000 a week, but the expense means this measure to keep the town alive may not last for long :

Senior state bureaucrats have discussed the possibility of moving residents from Leyburn, population 200, and Killarney, home to 1500 people.

Water Services Association executive director Ross Young said the Government had the power to move people.

"I'm not sure it has ever been used in Australia...The reality is with no water, you can't live anywhere for long."

Warwick Shire Mayor Ron Bellingham called evacuation an "Armageddon solution", but admitted it was a possibility for Leyburn.

If the drought doesn't break soon, which would require vast stretches of Australia to receive unprecedented and sustained rainfalls, the evacuation of towns that rely on bores and rivers for their fresh water will become a reality for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Australians in the years ahead.

Australia's 'Mega-Drought' To Cripple Local Food Supply

"Pray For Rain," Says Desperate Howard

Priest Says Praying For Rain Is Pointless

How bad is the Australian drought? Bad enough for it to be called a mega-drought. And bad enough for the prime minister, John Howard, to urge Australians to, literally, "pray for rain".

The Murray-Darling river system is only weeks away from drying up enough to force the prime minister to take action that will cut off fresh water flows to irrigators in Victoria's farmlands, known as "Australia's food bowl". Farmers and irrigators are claiming such action will result in the loss of more than 40% of Australia's fresh fruit and vegetables supply in the coming years, and will see Australia forced to relax its extremely strict quarantine measures to allow imports of foreign fresh food.

We're already hearing that we may soon be forced to pay four or five times what we currently do for some fruit and vegetables. The fast food chains must be clapping their hands in delight. How many young working families with shocking mortgage payments and crippling credit debts will pay absurd prices for the ingredients to make fresh, homemade salads when a fast food "dinner" will be substantially less?

Basically, if most of the catchment areas for the Murray-Darling Basin do not get virtually unprecedented rainfalls in the next two months, Australia's food bowl crop lands will get most of their water supplies cut off, to ensure urban areas get enough drinking water instead.

And "unprecedented rainfalls" mean months worth of rain, steady and continual. Nobody really believes that is going to happen, except the most optimistic of long-range weather forecasters.

Good thing the Howard government hasn't been ignoring its own chief scientists, and trying to silence them all, on the reality of the mega-drought and climate change for the past ten years, or Australians really might be in some serious trouble :

Zero water allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin would threaten crops such as citrus, stone fruit and grapes, some of which may take years to recover from a year without water.

New Zealand farmers said they were sympathetic to their Australian counterparts' plight and stood ready to help. But they said Australia must stop using its quarantine rules as a trade barrier.

A day after warning that all irrigation allocations could be suspended without heavy rains in the next two months, the Prime Minister said there might be a need to ship more food from overseas.

"Obviously it might be possible in some areas to import the foodstuffs that would otherwise come from Australian sources," Mr Howard said.

"Now we hope that doesn't happen, because we always like to see ourselves as being capable of meeting our own food needs and, in fact, providing for the food needs of others.

"But it's a question of rain and we must all hope and pray that over the next six to eight weeks it rains, it rains heavily, it rains in all the right areas, (and) there's plenty of run-off into the catchments."

Here's another example of how John Howard told Australians to get down on their knees, raise their hands to the heavens, and start praying for rain :

...he encouraged people to seek divine intervention.

"It's very serious, it's unprecedented in my lifetime and I really feel very deeply for the people affected,'' Mr Howard told ABC Television.

"So we should all, literally and without any irony, pray for rain over the next six to eight weeks.''

But Father Bob Maguire, an hilariously honest and straightforward priest from South Melbourne, who exemplifies everything a true Christian should be, said praying for rain was pointless, and a waste of time. He urged, instead, that some real, significant action be taken instead :

Bob Maguire says church leaders across Australia can pray for rain "until they go black in the face" but it won't solve the water crisis.

"Maybe our prayers need a creative spin, like 'O God, please turn this wine into water'," the Catholic priest said.

"Now I know a lot of people won't like it, particularly if people are making their prayers over a nice bottle of Grange, but this water problem is bigger than all of us boys and girls down here on ground level."

"Praying for rain is great and we will be doing it in our services, but we have to be prepared to work on finding solutions to the problem ourselves," he said.

The UK Independent devoted its front page and multiple pages inside a recent edition to spelling out the true scale of the disaster facing Australia, and it pushed the line (or lie) that the mega-drought was the first and most prominent example of a major country facing ruin due to the effects of severe climate change :

...its mighty rivers have shrivelled to sluggish brown streams. With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows at rock-bottom prices or buy in feed at great expense. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared.

Mr Howard acknowledged that the measures are drastic. He said the prolonged dry spell was "unprecedentedly dangerous" for farmers, and for the economy as a whole. Releasing a new report on the state of the Murray and Darling, Mr Howard said: "It is a grim situation, and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain."

But prayer may not suffice, and many people are asking why crippling water shortages in the world's driest inhabited continent are only now being addressed with any sense of urgency.

Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers. The Prime Minister refused to meet Al Gore when he visited Australia to promote his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He was lukewarm about the landmark report by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which warned that large swaths of Australia's farming land would become unproductive if global temperatures rose by an average of four degrees.

Faced with criticism from even conservative sections of the media, Mr Howard realised that he had misread the public mood - grave faux pas in an election year. Last month's report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted more frequent and intense bushfires, tropical cyclones, and catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef. The report also said there would be up to 20 per cent more droughts by 2030. And it said the annual flow in the Murray-Darling basin was likely to fall by 10-25 per cent by 2050. The basin, the size of France and Spain combined, provides 85 per cent of the water used nationally for irrigation.

Mr Howard has softened his rhetoric of late, and says that he now broadly accepts the science behind climate change. He has tried to regain the political initiative, announcing measures including a plan to take over regulatory control of the Murray-Darling river system from state governments.

British Media Hammer Howard For Refusing To Sign Kyoto, Blame Mega-Drought On Climate Change