We never sufficiently faced the danger of the SE QLD drought so recently over that threatened Brisbane with complete loss of water supply.
While we did a brilliant job tightening our water belts in households right across the SE we didn’t talk about what would happen if the 16% went down to 0%.
What would any of our houses be worth then?
What would any of our businesses be worth then?
What would we drink?
Where could 3 million people go? The drought was everywhere.
We didn’t talk about this out loud because the conclusions would have been so awful.
But now we have the flood immediate with dead people very visible immediate vast damage. We talk about the floods and the damage they have done.
The danger is that we will make decisions that err too much to protect against flood while erring insufficiently to protect against drought. With population growth the latter is a real danger.
Floods kill some people and cause a lot of damage.
Droughts end whole civilisations. They are much worse than flood. Historically it is drought that wipes out nations cities cultures.
Brisbane was caught very dangerously unprepared for the last drought because the senior planners had a history of facing flood and drought caught them completely out of left field.
Don’t let drought catch us with insufficient water supply again.
And no I don’t think adding recycled sewerage to our dams is a good idea. One mistake could knock out our whole water supply.