You think Wellington has water infrastructure issues? Spare a thought for rural Queensland towns, which are facing bills totalling around three billion dollars for new dam works.
Not to add any more water capacity, mind you. Despite many of them being drought-afflicted.
No, the upgrades are to spillways. You see, they have to be upgraded to protect people downstream from flooding events that might occur once in 470,000 years.
You think that’s ridiculous? Wait, there’s more!
Gordonbrook Dam, near Kingaroy, needs to have its spillway upgraded to protect about seven people downstream from a failure in a rare, potential ultra-extreme weather event.
That’s just scratching the surface, though.
Under new regulations in 2005, referable dams had upgrade targets instilled based on capacity to safely release floodwater.
Referable dams are those that would put two or more people at risk if the dam was to fail. There are 107 across the state.
The regulations are based on whether the risks are tolerable or intolerable based on the potential loss of life if a dam were to fail in significant weather events.
The calculations meant eight dams would need their spillways upgraded by 2025, while 30 would need to be upgraded by 2035.
For once, though, the ABC is strangely reluctant to touch on its otherwise favourite-ever topic: climate change. Oh, you just know climate change alarmism is behind all this.
Scientific advancements since many dams were designed and constructed mean engineers now have a better understanding of rainfall, hydrology (where the water flows), and the impact of climate change on the frequency and severity of weather events.
Ah, yes, the inescapable “impact of climate change”.
UNSW Water Research Centre PhD candidate Johan Visser said existing models of probable maximum precipitation have not been updated for at least 20 years, but recent meteorological events show that the climate is warming and making storms more intense and more frequent [...]
This means that many large dams constructed decades ago were designed using information representative of a cooler climate,” he said.
Chalk up a few more tens of billions for pointless ‘climate action’.
They included dams owned by local governments, private businesses, and state government-owned entities Sunwater, Seqwater, and the Gladstone Area Water Board.
Cloncurry Shire Council, Toowoomba Regional Council, South Burnett Regional Council, Western Downs Regional Council, and Logan City Council have dams that need to be upgraded by next year.
Queensland's auditor-general estimates the upgrades would cost about $3.1 billion.
Cressbrook Dam in Toowoomba region is rated as safe to a one-in-8,000-year flooding event. You’d think that would be safe enough for anyone’s reckoning. But the Climate Cult like to think big.
Mayor Geoff McDonald said […] when the upgrades were initially brought to the council's attention in 2007 the dam had to be upgraded to pass a one-in-3.2-million-year event.
Years of negotiations brought that figure down to a one-in-470,000-year event.
"You can imagine what the cost to do an upgrade would have been if we had stayed on that original standard," he said.
The loons behind this sort of nonsense can imagine quite a lot. And ratepayers are going to have to pay it.
Toowoomba Regional Council faces a bill of about $270 million to upgrade Cressbrook Dam […]
Cr McDonald has blamed the project for successive council rates rises, including a 5 per cent rise this year.
The council has also cut tens of millions of dollars from services in its $700 million budget this year to help pay for the upgrades.
But think of the people of 472,024 AD!
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