Late last year there were terrible bushfires across north eastern Victoria. Max Rheese sent us a note suggesting there was a need for more prescribed burning.
Now there is isolated flooding.
Following is a note and some photographs from Ralph Barraclough a landholder and a fire brigade captain with land adjacent and surrounded by the Alpine National Park (pdf file). The National Park contains many nationally significant species including the Bogong Daisy-bush, Mountain Pygmy Possum, Broad-toothed Rat and Alpine Water Skink. Large areas of the park burnt in 2003 and again in December last year.
Greetings,
Well after saving nearly everything when we were burnt out at Licola on December 14 last year, we are now being flooded out.
The damage here is so bad my house would not have a hope in hell of surviving a similar flood again. The debris is nearly as high as the spoutings and the previous biggest flood hight never even got to the footings after 36mm of rain in 20 minutes. This flood was from 28mm in 45 minutes.
Target Creek, Friday night 6pm
The first the locals knew I was in trouble was when 3km away at Licola they saw my worldly posesions floating down the local river. They are collecting my equipment 50km downstream. I live on a small creek that is a tributory.
The flood through my house was so intense it washed a Land Rover engine block out of my shed into the garden. The floor boards came up from the water underneath and tipped over all the stuff I had stored on chaires and stools to try and be above the flood waters. Industrial sewing machines were washed down along the creek.
I nearley drowned trying to get a Land Rover out of a shed when a tidel wave pushed me back in. There was so much debris floating around I had great difficulty remaining upright.
I am expecting more floods like this and this is nowhere like the worst case scenario. The country is just so burnt there is nothing to slow the water from getting into streams. Things are so bad here I will be salvaging as much as possible from my house and taking it to higher ground than Noah would consider drowning. Last week flooding wrecked a building site replacing a lost house from the fire. The new house suffered serious structural damege, a site hut was utterly flattened and a caravan ended up on a meter of debris.
Licola itself was also flooded out. The shop had water through it, all up 2 houses and the living area of the shop may have to be rebuilt. We have had tremendous help from the SES, Police and Wellington Shire and some of the local dear hunters. The CFA has offered very welcome support.
My files from the last 9 years of trying to https://cialico.com stop these things from happening were all removed from the house only hours before the flood and survive.
Regards,
Ralph Barraclough
Lincola, Victoria
Target Creek, Saturday morning 10am
Jamieson Road, Saturday morning
Good point, Peter, the last thing these people want is a test of significance or relevance.
But best watch and wait. Next time one of these clowns claims that it is all natural then keep a copy because when that is presented to a court it will mean that brown custard every 3 years is a natural event that must, therefore, be something that all species have evolved to deal with.
They will dig their own hole.
This is not an isolated case, what has been described above by both Stewie and Ralph has been happenning up and down the ranges from Canberra south to Victoria.
The ACT required a new, never before required, water treatment facility to be built in the year after the 2003 fires due to the massive amount of sedimentation and increased run off following those fires.
What really annoys me though is that opponents of fuel reduction burning cite model after model to support their non-interventionist philosophies. Yet, when a critical eye is passed over those very same models, the glaring omission is an utter lack of benchmarking against the kinds of extremely broad scale environmental damage that occurs after such wildfires.
Many ecological models fail such simple requirements as a comparison with the impact of major disturbance events, instead focussing on the impacts of a minor disturbance event against a theoretically undisturbed ecosystem.
It's bloody tragic really because the intellectual capacity does exist, though it seems the political will may not.
Clearly, Stewie, there is one standard for those who govern and another altogether for the governed. Those who govern have all the authority but no responsibility while the governed have all the responsibility but none of the authority.
Lets face it, we are talking about "unrepresentative, unaccountable swill" here. They are persecuting predatory scum who are a law unto themselves. They have no interest in the environment beyond the acquisition and exercise of control as the primary end in itself. And they have clearly demonstrated that this end justifies any means.
It has got to the point where any co-operation with these people is actually collaboration with an occupying power. Co-operation with them has become an act of betrayal of their victims, the communities that must live and work near any land that they occupy.
It is entirely appropriate, as you have done here, to observe, record and inform on the extent of the damage this scum is capable of doing, in the name of intergenerational equity no less.
But it is important to ensure that they get no assistance in their management of stolen property. We owe it to the kids to ensure that thieves get no benefit from goods obtained by deception. And we owe it to the kids to ensure that the only way to restore and protect a healthy environment is for the thieving scum to give it back to the people who know how to.
Further to my post above on turbidity levels…
This morning turbidity levels of 78,000mg/l were recorded on the Macalister River as, it enters Lake Glenmaggie. Many waterways draining from the badly burnt areas will be the same. As mentioned in my above post ‘normal’ levels fluctuate between 2- 20mg/l.
These levels blow the severity scale (Newcombe and Macdonald, 1991) out of the roof. My previous post mentions earlier recordings of 3600mg/l (a few days ago) getting a score of 12. The highest score is 14, which reads “80-100% mortality, total habitat destruction”. 78,000mg/l would require a score of well over 20, which does not exist. I think the department had better contact Newcombe or Macdonald and have their severity charts revised.
This severity table was presented by the Department of Natural Resources in the Parlimentary Inquiry into portable Eductor Gold Dredging (1991). In this inquiry the department decided that the levels of turbidity created by eductor gold dredging at between 12 mg/l to 50mg/l was potentially damaging certain species within the rivers. It may even contribute to the extinction of species they said. This was despite the fact that these increases in turbidity were highly localized and that normal increases in flow after rain, produced higher levels for a waterways entire length.
The departments behaviour during this issue is very reminiscent of what is currently happening with this AGW issue. That is, they would not listen to any dissenting points of view, even though, what they were claiming as ‘environmental damage’ was observably ludicrous. It seems that the lack of an ‘official’ report was their reason. All the reports being written were by a biased green bureaucracy.
So now we have flows coming down these same rivers, that the local water authorities are calling “like custard”, while government authorities and pretend environmentalists are calling these wildfires a ‘natural event’. When EGD’s operated in these same rivers, the smallest rise in background turbidity levels was said to potentially endanger species. How things change.
Not wishing to get into nit-picking but, Julian wrote:
despite the last few comments, it doesnt take an einstein to understand how and why the land is in that formation. sorry for the guy's loss, but regardless of the house being there for 80 years, there's been water in that place before, and no doubt there will be again! [End]
Yep. Sure. Because a few hundred thousand years ago, Target Creek was actually the original bed of either the Barkley or the Macalister. Forget which. But it was originally the river course, now cut off - which explains why there is such a small creek in such a large valley.
So please do not assume the creek is totally responsible for that landscape.
There are now seriously eroded gullies up there that hardly even run a trickle after five inches of rain.
There are now huge rock falls over the road, which have not occurred since it was built in the 1940s. Rocks of that size are actually not found as free rocks, anywhere in the Target Creek valley. Now they are.
So I think it is safe to say that this is an occurrence that has not happened since European occupation.
Or for a heck of a long time before.
It's always someone's fault. And usually, they're the easy targets (bloody greenies etc.)
Julian,
These mountains for hundreds of square kilometers have had their ground vegetation all but obliterated, by high intensity, environmentally unsustainable wildfire. There are areas adjacent to high intensity burn areas that remain unburnt, which provide remnant examples of high fuel load cover. If you want examples I can give you plenty.
What has come into Licola was not exactly water.
It was mud and debris that has been washed from the mountainsides and riparian zones. This is being repeated across the mountains, where ever there was high intensity fires followed by a medium to heavy rain. It’s happening right at this moment.
With the ground cover stripped the erosional potential is extreme. We now have sheet erosion across mountain slopes which is usually protected by plant matter and other 'fixed' debris.
Now stones, rocks and chunks of bedrock being mixed into a sludge of soil, charcoal and ash is running off 25-45deg slopes, many 100’s of metres high. Hundreds of thousands of tons of material, across the mountains, is being eroded away in one medium rain event alone.
Much of this ends up in the water courses below, with the sediment carrying capacity of the available water determining the extent/volume of eroded material that will be transported downstream. Much is dumped along the banks according to the depositional characteristics of that waterway.
The initial downpour would see a debris buildup form at the head of the water draining from the mountains, causing the velocity to slow, the water to spread and the pushing power to increase, thus bulldozing all before it. Witnesses saw walls of debris 15 ft high coming down the Mitchell River, East Gippsland following the 1939 fires after a heavy rain.
There are massive landslips now occurring in the mountains, including many instances of gullies being stripped down to bedrock for kilometers in length. Ancient blue clays and alluvial wash is being exposed along banks, that were buried/deposited thousands of years ago, due to the recently laid sediment deposits overlying it being stripped. Why is this happening?
It will take a very long time for these gullies to regain their geological stability. Some have now got very steep high banks on them with no vegetation. Undoubtedly, the sides of these gullies will collapse and erode for sometime to come.
In comparison…….
In 1998 we had massive floods in East Gippsland where it rained heavily, for days on end. Our local river, with a 2-3 metre average, maybe 3 metres in a flood, was roaring with a depth exceeding the height of the willows that grow along its bank. 10 metres plus, with all the local creeks and gullies very much alive. Prior to that the river was low, creeks were drying up and the lesser gullies were bone dry.
During the time of the 1998 floods, there were no gullies that came remotely close to being eroded to the extent that has now occurred. So why is it happening now?
Before you continue to pluck GW as a cause, I think you should first start with the fundamental principles of over-vegetation and lack of fire within many of our forest systems. Excessive fuel, drought, wind and fire Julian. What we have now are heat loads sometimes as high as 180,000kw per sq. metre, cooking the ground. The principles involved here ain’t rocket science and the outcomes disastrous.
Here, here Cuppa. Ralph has put in an extra ordinary effort for many, many years to try and get the government to urgently pick up their act on fuel reduction burn programs, to avoid/ameliorate the very thing that has just happened.
Julian take Ian Motts advice.
I can't believe that some are trying to shift blame onto the victims! I was up in Licola immediately after the fire, helping clear away the twisted metal & melted glass etc from a mate's completely burned out home. He lost everything whilst assisting a neighbour to save theirs. Since then he has worked like a beaver to clean up erect a temporary dwelling/home which has now been wrecked by the wall of water & debris.
My thoughts & best wishes go out to Licola residents. What they needare supportive gestures to assist in getting their lives & homes back together, not idiots who seek to blame by making them out to be ignorant. They know their country better than anyone else. If your home had been standing for 80 years why would you fear flooding? This was not a 'normal' flood, this is a disaster resulting directly from the recent fire.
We all know that Ralph Barraclough is a 'colourful' character, & a thorn in the side of government, but I assure you he knows of what he speaks, he is an extremely knowlegeable man, with huge energy & passion. His dedication to his community is second to none. Listen to him.
regards
Cuppa