Friday 29th of November 2024
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the floods and the railway...

barnabybarnaby

Barnaby Joyce has been called in to quell a revolt in a north-west New South Wales branch of the National party over the planned route of Australian Rail Track Corporation’s multi-billion-dollar inland rail project.

In an extraordinary move, the National party’s Narrabri branch voted last month to withdraw support for the government’s preferred route after hearing from long-term local irrigation and hydrology expert Jim Purcell.

 

A motion calling for an alternative route to be investigated was passed at a meeting on 15 February, with no one voting against and one abstention. 

The branch is in National party heartland, Nationals MP Mark Coulton’s north-west NSW electorate of Parkes.

The planned inland rail route has been highly contentious in the Narrabri community, including its council floodplain committee raising serious concerns about the potential for flood risk.

The chair of the National party’s Narrabri branch, Jocellin Jansson, was unable to attend the 15 February meeting.

In an email seen by Guardian Australia, Jansson altered the time of the next branch meeting due on 15 March to accommodate the deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce’s travel commitments.

Joyce is scheduled to attend along with inland rail representatives and Coulton.

On 1 March, Jansson sent the email to branch members announcing the meeting would be for members only.

She said in the email: “At the last branch meeting members heard from Jim Purcell and his perspective of the inland rail alignment in and around Narrabri.”

According to Jansson, the purpose of the meeting on 15 March would be “to ensure members have the opportunity to hear from inland rail themselves and the minister for infrastructure about the project”.

Joyce told the ABC on Friday that he would be meeting with National party members in Narrabri.

He said that because the inland rail gives regional Australia its greatest opportunity for economic development “we want to make sure that it happens and it happens as quickly as possible”.

“You hear people out but every time you make a change, you create a delay, and sometimes the delay is years, and every time you make a change then other people have a right to say ‘well considering you’re considering that change, why don’t you consider our change?’,” he said.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/04/barnaby-joyce-called-in-to-deal-with-narrabri-nationals-revolt-over-inland-rail-project

 

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manning the pumps...

As the rain bucketed down 10 days ago, residents of a nearby house in our neighbourhood in the outskirts of Brisbane were woken by a loud cracking.

Their newly built home had begun slipping down the hill.

The phenomenal amount of rain that had already fallen had caused a landslip that had destabilised the foundations, forcing them to evacuate in the darkness to a shed on flatter ground.

It took two days to be able to make out the carnage — the white and yellow home usually in clear view across the valley from our back verandah was obscured by the blinding rain.

When it finally eased, we could see the front stairs were gone, the front house-poles splayed down the hill, and the right-hand side of the house was slumped awkwardly, peering over the steep incline.

No doubt they'll need to pull the house down and start again.

Records will continue to tumble

Mt Glorious just to the north of Brisbane received more than 700 millimetres in 24 hours.

Further north, Maryborough endured its second major flood in as many months.

 

Gympie, used to semi-regular flooding, was under more water than it had been in more than 100 years.

The Mary River, which intersects both towns, was at its highest peak in Gympie since 1893.

In Brisbane, bridges and causeways were flooded. Then entire streets. Nervous residents watched as the river pushed into more houses with each high tide.

Residents of Brookfield in Brisbane's west reported emptying more than 1,000 mm of water from rain gauges between Thursday and Sunday.

As the system tracked south, some Lismore locals thought they'd be safe taking shelter on, or in, their roof spaces.

But the floodwaters didn't stop rising – 1974's record flood markers throughout the town were eclipsed by the swelling brown water.

Volunteers in tinnies and on jet-skis were going rooftop to rooftop, ferrying residents to higher ground. In some cases they had to cut people out from inside roof spaces. 

 

At the time of writing, 16 people had died in Queensland and New South Wales, with that figure likely to rise.

This is the second "one-in-100-year" flood in 11 years in south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Two years ago, these regions were in the grips of bushfire.

Descriptors like "rain bomb" are being bandied about as politicians and reporters search for new adjectives to describe the system that dumped more rain on parts of the south-east than the fabled 1974 floods. 

Just like in 2011, the word unprecedented has been thrown around a lot.

 

It may well be unprecedented. But it's not unexpected. 

This is the new precedent; the new present.

And yes, weather systems are variable, rainfall especially.

Of course a one-in-100 year event doesn't guarantee it'll only happen once every 100 years. And yes, it's a La Niña year when rainfall totals are expected to be higher. And yes, we've always had extreme weather.

It will take time for scientists to determine how much climate change contributed to the devastation, this time.

But this is what climate change looks like. Big weather, tumbling records, one extreme following another.

And it's going to get worse.

Big polluters 'guilty of arson of our only home'

Climate forecasts say that warming will cause more intense storm events. A hotter atmosphere is capable of carrying more moisture before it's released. A warmer ocean carries more energy to fuel storm systems.

We're only at around 1.1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-03-07/climate-change-floods-storms-weather-time-to-talk/100882016

 

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