Jack Houghton, Digital Editor Exactly three years ago today the rural town of Forbes in western New South Wales was under water. More than a thousand people were driven from their homes and many farmers lost everything as their paddocks and fields were transformed into swamps.
Millions of dollars of crops were lost and the broader repair bill was estimated to be in the billions. This reporter spent weeks covering that flood and documented the reasons it came to fruition. Wyangala Dam hit 100.2 per cent capacity during the height of the disaster but the truly disturbing fact was it took just two months for the volume of water to rise from 38 per cent to 90 per cent. It was not reported at the time, but the reason the water was not released during that rapid rise was fear of drought and what would happen to farmers if the dam went dry. Why waste the most precious resource rural communities have? The decision to release water simply became a gamble based, predominantly, on weather predictions. The problem was by the time they realised a water release was necessary, as the dam reached critical levels, many people had already lost their homes. And now the water release was far more damaging that it would have been months earlier. The banks of the Lachlan River had already burst and more than 35,000 mega litres of water were pouring into an already drenched town. The fallout was tragic. Fast-forward three years and the region is now being strangled by drought. The Forbes Advocate, a formidable rural paper, has reported locals are discovering the carcasses of kangaroos which have dropped dead while searching for water. And the lack of water has led to a reduction in food for wildlife which in turn leads to starvation and more death. It is no surprise the journalist followed that revelation with the claim the sight contributed “to the sense of despair for locals facing the harshest disaster in living memory”. They are people who have endured more in recent years than most city-dwellers will in a lifetime. But this writer does not accept that’s the way it has to stay. Greens MPs might dislike the idea of dams, safe from their suburban enclaves with plenty of drinking water at hand. They argue the dams steal from local waterways and creek-beds which foster marine life and instead funnel the water to farmers. This can be true. Although there are hardly any waterways left anyway so the point is rather moot. Instead, lets look at the issue from a mathematical perspective. The higher capacity of any water storage system the better equipped a community is to deal with volatile weather conditions. Today the dam has dipped just below 21 per cent. If dam operators were not forced to release thousands of megalitres of water three years ago that number would be far higher. Thankfully the Coalition has made a $650m commitment to increase the capacity of Wyangala Dam. A great start, but this is just one case study of a broader issue in rural Australia. There are many more towns which need water infrastructure and they don’t need the issue to be hijacked by activists groups of Greens politicians who have never even visited the communities. In NSW alone a report prepared last year recommended investigating building new dams in Border, Gwydirm, Peel valleys and Murrumbidgee. The coast estimation was eye-watering at nearly $3 billion dollars. But one of the proposed new dams, on the Murrumbidgee River, near Mingay, could provide up to 1000 giga litres of water capacity. This reduces the risk of flood and drought dramatically, at a cost of $1.174 billion. We have to accept that Australia does not have an infinite budget for infrastructure but the longer we debate the merit of infrastructure the longer our farmers, and the communities built around them, suffer. Farmers and business owners are happy to be in the media spotlight this week with the Coalition’s drought tour. Let’s just hope it doesn’t end up being a talkfest with no real solutions. We need fewer grinning politicians at the scene of natural disasters and more engineers building solutions.