Council failure to listen will lead to another flood mess
HAVING viewed the poignant Four Corners program Washed Away on Monday July 11, featuring the devastating southern flood events and associated human trauma – and being a flood victim myself – motivated the compilation of this brief narrative of my own flood experience in 2019, which destructively flooded a great portion of the town.
Being one of the last homes constructed in my built-out Aitkenvale area in 1997, I prudently conducted a prerequisite area flood risk assessment analysis prior to building. This pragmatic research revealed the area to be flood-free due to the existence of a longstanding proven protective flood mitigation levee, constructed in the early 1940s by the US Army to floodproof a close by US Air Force hospital with the levee proving its worth during the big historic flood of 1946 thus validating a good reason for its construction in the first instance.
However in the year 2000, in the absence of a required Community Consultation process in accord with the requirements of the Local Government Act or a civil engineering hydrological survey report pertaining to possible future flooding, a lack of probity resulted in an autocratic in-house Townsville City Council decision to allow this valuable public asset flood mitigation levee to be destroyed by a private land developer for personal gain. This decision regrettably was reasoned on the false premise that with the
1972/74 constructed Ross River Dam being a flood mitigation dam thereby rendered the levee redundant as all future area flooding would now be a thing of the past.
With this misguided definitive statement amplified and as a displaced 2019 flood victim, upon reoccupying my reconstructed flood damaged home in early 2020, another concerned supportive flood affected resident and myself undertook in-depth personal research to identify our area flood causal and actioned representation of our findings for remedial council attention. Predictably enough our research revealed that a recorded
riverine water depth of 870M/M had entered via the area where the past levee had been located with this water then entering our area via the end of Thompson St and flooding the local and widespread areas as far as Hyde Park before flowing into Ross Creek.
With all of our positive time consuming proven survey work collated and communicated to the council in the natural expectation that they would want to correct their mistakes of the past to avoid recurring costly future flood damage events, regrettably was all to no avail.
Having enacted supportive representation for a replacement
1.5m retrograde levee to return this riverine flood water back into the river where it belonged, all that was forthcoming from the council was an illogical and irresponsible rejection in spite of it being well known by the council that both state and federal
financial assistance was available for corrective flood mitigation purposes, just defies belief.
With this wanting easily fixable flood causal situation identified and supported by our indisputable evidence-based representation to the council and then to only have our findings uncooperatively dismissed was in my opinion a travesty in common sense and a breach of community health and safety.
As all the aggrieved area flood victims had a logical sweeping social expectation of a replacement levee in order to feel safe again, because without the levee protection, future flooding is going to happen again and again which is ludicrous and which brings the integrity of present day council decision making into serious question and thereby creating acrimoniously local disunity.
RON BENNETT,
Aitkenvale
INFLATION TRIGGER
NURSES, teachers, train drivers, and anyone else who feels like disrupting our country and bringing industry, travel and commerce to a halt is happily doing just that.
And not a word from the bloke they elected to run Australia. One doesn’t have to wonder why; well of course he supports this kind of stuff, he’s a cheerleader. Besides, he’s off giving the French $8 or $9 billion or so. Anyone with half a brain (no, hang on, we’ll read just that figure to a quarter of a brain, that will do) understands that all associated costs will automatically have to rise now.
Plain common sense that
somehow doesn’t seem to become apparent until it hits them in the face – and even then, the majority can’t see it. Yes, the strikers will cause inflation.
COLIN BAKER, Pentland
RUSSIANS WILL STRIKE FIRST
NEW York City has released a new public service announcement video that advises residents what to do after a nuclear strike on the city.
The joyfully presented video advises residents to go into buildings and undress, then shampoo and use soap to wash themselves off. Once done, residents are told to stay indoors until directed what to do by government media sources. Sounds like a quick way to die.
According to an announcement published by Russian news agency TASS, the USA is pushing Russia into a cycle of nuclear escalation that could end in catastrophe.
Remember that Russia has vastly superior nuclear strike capabilities and anti-air defences compared to the United States and European nations. On top of that, Russia’s military doctrine describes a “first strike” advantage, which means Putin knows that if this war is irreversibly headed into global conflict, his strategic advantage is best exploited if he strikes first.
JUSTIN MOXHAM, Townsville
THE REAL FACTS
COLIN Baker (Letters, 13/7) rightly values “real facts” but misses a few big ones. Firstly, he dismisses the need for Australia to act on climate change because China and India emit more CO2.
He forgets that since the start of the industrial revolution, the US and Europe have emitted three times the amount of C02 as China and India combined. Colin may not know that today, China leads the world in renewable energy (1020GW), more than three times that of the US (325GW) at number two. Another fact is that “in recent weeks” in Australia coal-fired power stations were brought back online because they had broken down or were undergoing maintenance, not because renewables were failing as Colin implies. He will find that coalfired power in Australia is fast becoming uneconomical and the Australian Energy Market
Operator’s latest Integrated System Plan states “14GW (61 per cent) of coal could exit by 2030”, the National Electricity Market “will operate without coal generation by 2043”, and “more than 85 big batteries with a total capacity of 18,660MW (are) in the planning pipeline.”
Finally, while Colin rightly identifies the “clearing of vast areas of the Amazon rainforests in Brazil” as a major contributor to climate change, he again lets Australia off the hook. From 2001 to 2021, sadly there was a 21 per cent decrease in Australia’s tree cover compared to 12 per cent of Brazil’s.
We all live on the same planet and we all have a responsibility to look after it. That’s a fact.
ROSS CLARK, Freshwater