SOME of you would have heard of Australian rangeland ecologist, Dr Bill Burrows. Bill, now retired, lives on the dunes at Emu Park with views of the flood plume flowing north from the Fitzroy River mouth. According to Bill this has been one of the least dramatic and cleanest floods with only occasional frothing from pollution visible in the Coral Sea and, up to this time, much less debris washing up than even with the much smaller flood in 2006.
Bill witnessed the 1954 flood (the second highest since Europeans arrived) which was still just receding when a young Queen Elizabeth visited Rockhampton on March 16 that year. Bill’s father was a station ‘ringer’ during the 1918 flood; known locally as The Great Flood which peaked at 10.03 metres (almost one metre higher than this event). In the scheme of things, according to Bill, the present case is just another flood and not a particularly severe one relative to 1954 or 1918 – and much cleaner than previous floods, perhaps because of improved land and river bank management.
Yesterday afternoon Bill and I did our bit by collecting some of the flood debris washed up on the beach. Amongst the water hyacinth and hymenachne (an exotic water grass) we found a small drum of oil and lots of empty Coca Cola bottles. I took some photographs and so did Bill (earlier in the morning of the plume and froth) … click on each image for a better, clearer, larger view.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
unfortunately the doomsayers are already declaring the destruction of the GBR.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/01/05-3
Emu Park looks like a very beautiful place to live Jen.
on a lighter note, when I lived by the ocean north of Byron Bay there was always a brown scum after a storm. The scum came from the damaged seaweed on the reef just a few hundred metres offshore but I used to tell the tourists it was the 15+ washed up from Byron Bay 🙂
What an amazing story – from a quick look from the beach and remembering back clearly to 1954 Burrows assesses this flood to be “cleaner”. Why take water samples? Indeed the water in Rockhampton looks almost transparent.
G’day “Luke”. I stand by my ‘clean’ statement, as it was directed at the amount of debris in the plume which in these events often ends up on the beach in front of my shack. But perhaps I have a biased slant, viewing the flood & plume with my naked eye, rather than via a TV screen? A more telling message of this flood is that it is just one of a long line of similar floods recorded back to the 1860’s. It reminds us that over both the long and short term the weather changes all the time – but the more we might complain about it ‘the more it remains the same’.
Bill,
I was quite impressed by how clean the bay looked after weeks of heavy run-off. It doesn’t look much different than it would be from a good spate of tradewinds.
Luke, OTOH, can tell us what pollution was in all those old floods of the past.
nice photos and great to see each of you doing your bit; I never realised that grass lining the shore and I have seen it lots of times was an exotic sea grass
There are so many variables at play in every flood,it would be difficult to say anything definitive about their relative ‘cleanliness’. But Bill could well be right. February and March this year saw a small flood [if there is ever such a thing in a catchment this large] and the year has been very moist by comparison to conditions preceding the Feb 1954 flood. The catchment would have been very green,and less erodable in comparison with the run-up to 1954.
1953 was a dry year,with many stations experiencing very dry autumns,winters and springs. After the catchment was primed by January rains the February 54 deluge came,and ‘worked over’ a catchment that had not generated any flood at Rockhampton for two years,according to the BOM flood history. This suggests there would have been a lot of material to move.
Jan 1991 seems to have been mainly generated by huge falls in the north of the catchment,which had been pretty dry over the preceding eight months. Bill may remember,but it was possibly a faster flood,more erosive in a dry catchment. Does this make sense,Bill?
Debris has very little effect on coral.
Silt can have, but in many areas just a few days of good trade winds, after a silting will have the growing areas of coral, on the reef periphery, quite clean.
Other areas, where large dirty rivers such as PNGs Fly, & Sepic discharge continuous loads of silt the coral has no chance.
However, the silt is no where as damaging to coral as is the fresh water.
If ever you are trying to navigate areas which are poorly charted, you look for areas of high runoff to find a passage through corral. This works despite the fact that in many of these areas the fresh water is quite clean.
You see the same lack of coral growth in lagoons which have restricted exchange of their internal water, & the open ocean water. These lagoons have low salinity in the wet season, which severely restricts coral growth, & quite high salinity in the dry season, which appears to be almost as bad for the coral.
You will find thriving coral on the outside of these reefs, where growth a hundred yards away, in water just as clean, almost no coral survives. Considering that many of these lagoons are hundreds of miles from any supply of silt, another explination is required.
It appears that our marine biologists pontificating in the media on the effect of this flood will have on coral, & why, have a similar grasp on their subject as our climate scientists have on theirs.
Yea Hasbeen!
Long time no hear.
Interesting points. My navigation around coral is usually by the brail method. Like a big pinball machine.
How did you survive the floods?
(1) Val – the grass washed up on the beach is Hymenachne amplexicaulis – an exotic grass introduced by CSIRO & enthusiastically promoted in the 1980’s/90’s by QDPI as a grass for planting in shallow water storages or ‘ponded pastures’. Unfortunately it is a free seeder which has gone ‘feral’ infesting many streams in Central Queensland. In the 2008 flood the local council had to use front end loaders & tip trucks to remove it from Capricorn Coast beaches in the flood’s aftermath. Subsequently there have been many campaigns to remove this new weed from our streams & in comparison with the 2008 flood I would have to say there appears to be a favourable result. Nevertheless, like the cane toad, I suspect we are stuck with it. The grass in the foreground vegetation in my ‘flood plume’ photo is actually beach spinifex (Spinifex sericeus)
(2) Poly – Yes if the present flood is a relatively ‘clean’ one it owes a lot to the fact that it occurred after a year of above average rainfall which led to the catchment being unusually well grassed. Furthermore the current event (9.2m Rockhampton flood peak) was preceded by an earlier flood in December (7.5 m peak) which no doubt gave the catchment a pre-clean. All up this should ensure the present flood waters are chemically innocuous, despite the prognostications of the doomsayers as highlighted by John Sayers. And as I sit on my front deck & marvel at the 2 “Syd Harbs” of flood water rushing past each day I very much doubt it will be a recognisable entity destined to end up in the Whitsundays as the doomsayer predicts! A huge body of water this flood may be, but it is still only a pimple on a dimple of the volume in the Coral Sea.
Val,
Bill has gone to some effort to cultivate the grass and keep the trees away from Emu Park. Hopefully Bill will let me make this the topic of a future blog post. It is a great story with a history that pre-dates the 1918 flood.
Hi Drongo, been off the net a while.
We had 14 inches last month, & 4 so far this month, but the upper reaches can’t have had that much, the river has not got up much at all.
We’re on a ridge about 80 Ft above the plain, we’ve been flooded in a few times, but never out.
Looking at those photos again, that flood plume is cleaner than what you see, on any ebb tide, coming out of the mangrove creeks north of Mackay & south of the Whitsundays.
Great to see Jen with her nose back to the grindstone. This always the best blog.
Bill thank you for those educative comments and Jen would be great to see a post from Bill
meanwhile here’s Tony’s next report http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/rockhampton-flood-crisis-attack-of-the-blood-suckers/
and he needs some old fashioned remedies for sandfly bites
anybody got some?
Where I spend most of my time these days, ticks and leeches are more of a problem than sandflies and skozzies but keeping well covered up is always important. Otherwise there is endless advice [always good] on the web.
Coming home every morning covered in licks and teeches I emailed a friend to see if she had a good recipe for them:
“Yes, take two dozen leaches, sautee them with chopped onion, add herbs and spices of your choice. Mash it all up and put it in a sausage skin and serve it up to your guests as blood pudding! Eee by gum, it’s good!”
I wonder if the the white bits are black?
Haven’t got one for ticks yet.
WE had a treatment for sand fly bites, we used to use in the Whitsundays.
There are about 4 different strains of them in the Whitsundays, & a couple of them only appear at limited times of the year. This was successful in reducing the itching with three strains, but early application was necessary for best results.
We used very hot [just off boiling], water, & a cotton bud. The idea was to dip the cotton bud in the water, push the tip down onto the bite, & hold it there as the thing cooled. It worked for most bites, & by reducing the itching, the main problem was removed.
There was one type of sand fly I have only found at Whitehaven beach, & middle Percy Island where this treatment was the wrong thing to do. It would bring the bite to a head, with a little open weeping head, which took ages to heal.
Mercurochrome applied immediately to this head would stop it, & would help with scratched bites, otherwise they were a real problem, particularly if continually in & out of salt water. With Mercurochrome no longer available, I do not know what would help, once the bite is open.
When we first moved to Queensland in 1960 (from Mexico, er Victoria, sorry) as children, all 5 of us got affected by sand flies that first Summer, and from then on, we were okay. Mum used Peroxide and Calamine lotion, something my good lady wife recommended as well when this flared up. The chemist turned her nose up at this and recommended antihistamine tablets and special creams.
I tried both with little effect. Patiently, my good lady waited. Day three, she used the Peroxide and Calamine and lo and behold, the itching left, and the sores are healing. I have pink legs, but who cares, as the itching has significantly eased.
Funny thing is, the supermarkets are out of Peroxide and Calamine.
Must be a lot of ‘old wives’ in Rocky!
great to hear Tony; I googled ‘natural remedies for sand fly bites’ and came up with ‘rub on a clove of garlic’; might make you more presentable to the girls than pink legs or an alternate when the calamine runs out
thanks so much for your reports; I tried to leave a comment on the site but had to plough through so many registrations and passwords that I gave up; but I hoped you’d pop over here to take a look
but I did click on the five gold star which your granddaughter would appreciate
The same silt minimisation effect can be achieved by thinning out trees so the grass cover is thicker. The fewer trees demand less soil moisture between RF events and that means grass continues to grow for longer. Of course, nothing does a better job of silt minimisation than a very good network of small dams in the upper catchment, especially if they are combined with overflow channels that direct excess water into nearby pondable pastures.
Silt transportability is directly linked to the square of the change in velocity. Halve the velocity and the sediment load will be reduced to a quarter. The velocity is highest in the steeper upper catchments so any measures that reduce that velocity, and related volume, will produce a greater than proportionate reduction in sediment transport than an equal impoundment downstream.
Yet, the fetish of choice amongst the resource management mafia is the stream bank buffer zone. These do absolutely jack $hit to reduce runoff volume or slow runoff velocity, except after very mild rainfall events when sediment movement is minimal anyway. At the critical times in sediment cycles, the people claiming most moral authority and expertise in sediment management are totally off with the fairies with symbolic sacrifices of other people’s productive capacity. Indeed, they have gone out of their way to effectively preclude any form of off-stream runoff capture, let alone in-stream capture in the critical 1st, 2nd and 3rd order systems.
It is worth reflecting on the fact that a $billion worth of lost farm gate crop production is bowling through Rocky evey day. And the tax on that production means a fully funded teaching hospital, or the price of training 1000 Rural Doctors, or the price of a gateway bridge, or 1000 school shed rip-offs, is squandered every three days. We are currently at day 9, I think, with at least another 12 days in store even if we don’t get a single extra drop by the end of March.
The flush on day 1 served an essential ecological service to estuarine species. But every day since is nothing more than yet another squandered opportunity.