Ever tried to trace the Snowy River on a map? It goes on and on, no shortage of water.

Just because its long does not mean it has water in it. That river is diverted by the Snowy Hydro etc. system inland.

What happens now that the 183+ Nutters have burnt the forest is that 70% of the water will be lost as evaporation & runoff that will cause erosion and fill the tributaries with ash. Contaminating the water.

Look at the area from the Channel Country that feeds the Darling & we have stuffed it: killed nearly every living thing in it by drying it into a series of deadly puddles.

How does climate change fit in to looneys lighting 3/4 of the fires in forests full of an over burden of fuel, also caused by more lunatics. If I try to escape via my front gate, there is that much fuel on the sides of it I will get incinerated.

It is extremely frustrating to be sitting here on tenterhooks in a sea of smoke surrounded by a mountain of fuel that is going to incinerate the farm & every animal on it. There is a fire pump however, if the power fails & the generator runs out of fuel. There is no reticulated mains water & all of the potable water in the tank will be sacrificed & last 25 minutes or less, with what is in it. That of course leaves me with none. And that is what faces many Farmers as the tanks have been destroyed & any remaining water polluted.

Wangaratta that has two Rivers joining in it: They are supplementing their water supplies from bores.

Newvista,
When I was a boy I lived right on the snowy River in a small one horse town!
Dalgety ! The river use to be beautiful and I would swim in it as a boy ,so would the Tiger snakes , they love the water. I was from the city and moved there when I was around 8 years old ,pete

Dalgety ... was from the city

What city were you from?
It's strange, I was just "touring" Dalgety (pop 205) last night as "one of the only towns on the Snowy". The google archive is low res but I could catch a glimpse of the actual river (and bridge) from one end of the holiday-park. The pub there has a lot of character, implies the population was once much greater.

Newvistor,
I was from Sydney,I was born in Ryde,but after my dad passed away,my mum got a job running ski lodges in the ski fields in the snowy we lived in the lodges,it was after this she bought the house in Dalgety.

The town had 1 pub,1 little shop, there is also a colonial gaol there ontop of the hill.
The school had about 20 kids and one teacher who would have to teach all the different ages and grades in one room at the same time.
Dalgety was one of the town's being considered to become the capital of Australia, To which Canberra won and became the capital city .
The River use to be truly beautiful ,deep and flowing,but there is some controversy regards the snowy scheme and their dams destroying the natural flow of the river.
I lived there as a boy in the 70s .
The town folk are mostly sheep farmers and are mostly all related!
But I imagine that's all charged now .....
I loved the river as a boy and I would follow it for miles and miles

Pete

Due to arsonists & forest mismanagement its probably the same as most small hamlets in that area: Largely ashes. Information may be hard to get. ABC in particular, is too busy promoting climate change, rather than the real cause.

Marc

The Ovens River in Wangaratta looks the same in both google 2010 & 2017 views (no doubt regulated flow by dams)(doesn't help farmers out on the plains.)

First comment just to acknowledge the massive effort of the volunteer firefighters that they have been making for months now. Strange that only those in NSW deserve financial compensation according to the visiting representative for Hawaiian Tourism; how good is that! As a member of an Army team supporting CFS firefighters in the 1983 Adelaide Hills fires, I understand how difficult and dangerous the task can be and those fires lasted only a couple of weeks. Pity the only LNP pollie that has any experience in firefighting is Tony Abbott.

Unless you have seen it firsthand it is hard to understand how fast a fire can travel with a strong wind behind it. I have experienced a grass fire go past me when I was doing 110 Km/hr on a country highway. I was lucky that the wind blew the smoke away too so I could still see where I was going and find a safe spot to stop. The area around me was open paddocks but if it had been trees or scrub I would have been in serious trouble. I think that this is what happened to the two men killed on Kangaroo Island.

As Marcc has described the Australian landscape is now dry and extremely flammable which leaves few places of safety other than the immediate shoreline in coastal areas. It seems that the hard learnt lessons of the 1939 bushfires that burnt half of Victoria have been forgotten. The current fires have already covered a much greater area than those in 1939.

The particular matter I intended to mention is how modern technology has failed so completely in the areas burnt or effected by the current fires. It was predicable that the various power transmission lines would be damaged and most likely fail when a high intensity fire burnt around them but it would seem that few people realised that no power means no shop lighting, no refrigeration, no petrol pumps, no efpos, no paywave, no ATMs, no cash withdrawals, no mobile phone coverage, no NBN, no internet, no e-mail, no Facebook, no Twitter, no TV and no FM radio. Information and advice was broadcast on AM but seriously, who has anything as low-tech as an AM radio these days? If the roads are closed then 'just-in-time' freight delivery just doesn't deliver. There have been a couple of 'Y2K was a big Hoax' documentaries on TV in the last few weeks but perhaps the recent experiences of those in Batemans Bay and Mallacoota for their holidays might indicate that technology is more fragile than Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, et al would like us to believe.

There's an AM radio in every car.

What the South Coast saga has demonstrated is what we already knew - Kevin Rudd's NBN was never going to have the staying power of the old copper phone network which in itself wasn't infallible but was certainly more robust than what is in place now.

We have 90% of the landmass linked by fixed wireless: Dumb, Dumb, Dumb.

This having been a farm for 140 + years means there is a written and verbal legacy as to what went on. Grandfather mums side got burnt & survived in one of those early fires.

The reality with organisations such as Telstra is that they have become profit before people & money is more important. Some of the equipment supplied in the form of Modems etc. are clearly made by the lowest bidder and conform to No RFI standards. most of the other equipment also shows "done on the cheap".

Time has taught us here, that you cannot ever rely on electricity, nor much else. NBN, and the landline have serious issues with redundancy, a few have power plants however, many don't and they are generally not that well maintained. In times gone by if there was a fire there was a PMG person despatched to keep the exchange running. I have already mentioned the condition of the cables & general lack of maintenance.

Naturally if the power goes down the domestic equipment cant talk to it anyway as it too has no redundancy.

That means that I have to depend on myself. I did have a UPS from a certain Electronics supermarket and am still waiting for them to reply.
So there is a petrol driven inverter, which is quite handy for powering electric chainsaws etc. and fridges etc during long power outages. Then there is no reticulated mains water, so what one has is it. I have ordered more in for the house & washed the tractor so now its blowing a half gale and trying to rain.

That means that with water; if the power fails the pump on the dam 500 metres away has to be subbed if possible for a petrol one but you cannot stop the flow or it will boil in the pump body, or a petrol pump goes onto the house line (which has a bypass back to the tank) or the generator runs the pump.

Joys of being rural.

Marc

Photo uploaded to Post 15.

Wow it bucketed down tonight here in Canberra. Bloody nice.

Let's see... forecast says 95% chance of rain with thunderstorms. However, it's sunny and dry as a bone. It's that undecided 5% that gets in the way...


EDIT: spoke too soon... clouds came, and now it's raining. Not enough to put out the fires, but certainly it is welcome. Perhaps there will be more of it to come.

Mostly a dry storm on the north side this morning but very welcome rain tonight. Sydney's south west did cop it this morning though.

None of this early rain will be drought breaking unfortunately. The ground is too dry and it'll spend a few days just soaking up what falls like a sponge. We will need weather like this for weeks before dams will start filling. Let's hope it happens.

I noted today that the Spring fed dam is making water as it was coming in a foot above water level. This dam was cleaned out in 1982 during that drought and had no water in it as a consequence. Four days before the first rain came it started to fill.

One is hoping history repeats.

Marc