On the news for past year, all we hear about is the floods in Lismore and western Sydney and Forbes and Deniliquin, etc etc, lots of whingers , complaining about flooding and damage time and time again. Constantly asking what is the Govt going to do about compensating them because Insurance companies don't want to pay, etc, etc. Then we get the Greens whinging about climate change and giving their crap about "this is the worst flood ever!" blah blah, typical rhetoric from dope smoking, lentil eating, Greenies and hippies.
All this flooding can be stopped, or to be more precise, it can be greatly reduced. Nothing difficult about the problem. The Egyptians built mammoth projects like pyramids, so in this modern age it can't be too difficult to reduce flooding when we get lots of heavy rain. Surprisingly, I not heard anyone suggest it in the media about this.
All the Govts should be doing is building Flood Mitigation Dams. These are not like the typical storage dams like Warragamba, FMD's are much smaller and only temporarily hold the water, we can control the flow from the dam to mitigate flooding. a FMD's are temporary storage, unlike a storage dam where you try to keep it full all the time, particularly in a drought period. Also FMD's could be used for partial storage, but the idea is that the bulk of the storage in a FMD is purely temporary storage during heavy rain periods. FMD's are situated upstream from floodplains or storage dams. In a place like Lismore, there are many tributaries in the high country that eventually all congregate at Lismore, the idea is have multiple small Flood Mitigation Dams across all tributaries and there maybe more than one FMD on a single tributary.
The advantage of FMD's is they don't all need to be built on the same day, the cost can be spread over 30 years, by building one at a time, I say 30 years, as the next big floods will probably be in another 30 years. Unlike a storage dam, where a decision is made to build one, then you need to build one now, plus it hard to find the large basin/valley to build one, whereas FMD's are smaller, you have more choice on where to put them and have lesser impact on the environment than big storage dams. Another advantage of FMD's is reduction of land erosion, slowing the flow reduces the soil and crap ending up in the ocean.
At Warragamba they talking about building a higher wall, which is great for extra storage, but when it rains, they are just going to open the flood gates again and flood the Hawkesbury, realistically Warragamba needs FMD's or FMD's with partial storage further up the catchment area to slow the flow of heavy rains. Then add FMD's on the Colo River, as the flood bottleneck is where the Colo River meets the Hawkesbury. We don't need massive valleys dammed up as storage, but smaller dams to slow the flow.
Paying for it ? the Govt. should ask the Insurance Companies to chip in some money to help pay, because, in the long term, the Insurance companies would benefit from not having to pay massive claims when there are big floods. In the long term, the Govt saves on taxpayer money, as they won't need to keep paying compensation to flood victims who can't afford insurance.
