IT’S TIME TO ADDRESS OUR FUTURE WATER NEEDS

IT seems a bit weird to be talking about water security issues during a week in the tropics like this. But that’s exactly what Cairns Mayor Bob Manning is doing. And he has a very good point. If you don’t have water, you don’t have anything, let alone the capacity to grow.

The council wants $215m for its Cairns Water Security Stage 1 project, essentially to future-proof our growing region.

As the region with the fastest population growth, it’s no wonder the council has its eyes trained on water storage.

Their statistics forecast a shortfall due to Copperlode Dam and Behana Creek, our water sources, not being big enough to sustain a population estimated to hit about 215,000 by the middle of the decade.

Record April records tumbled this week as hundreds of millimetres slammed us, but ask any long timer a few weeks back and they would have told you all the same thing: We just haven’t had enough rain this wet season.

In our browner sister city down the road, Townsville, you would have thought that water security should have been its biggest priority decades ago.

But a long-time belief that it always rains helped put a stadium on top of the priority list.

It got the government big bucks, then the city stared dire water shortages in the eye and it had to act.

COVID will only make us more attractive to the rest of the country so depending on it raining the same amount every year is folly.

Reliable water storage isn’t as shiny or sexy as a new stadium but neither is living in the tropics and watching rain flow out to sea, then being told you have to restrict your water use just so you have enough to drink.

It’s best we start planning now.