Thread: The Channel Country, from drought to a one in forty year flood.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

Just to add to that, I would point out that as well as the divide Brian is talking about there is an area of internal drainage, with Lake Galilee and Lake Buchanan, which means that unless you are planning to fill up that whole area (the inhabitants might have some views on that!) you would need to have a second set of pumps to get the water over the second divide.

And the water would have to be in pipes all, or most of the way, to manage evaporation - to make a point, the Thompson at Longreach floods reasonably often, and mostly has a good flow, but due to evaporation, rarely reaches Lake Eyre. Further, the second reason that it would need to be mostly in pipes, is that there is too little elevation change for the water to flow at sufficient speed to move the sort of volumes needed. And the pipes would need to be big, maybe 100 - 1000 times the cross section area of the pipes use for the Wentworth - Broken Hill pipeline just opened - it looked to be about 40cm.

I was thinking west. I had forgotten the Galilee Basin. Yes, it would need to be filled or pumped over. There would probably be several wet seasons of water to fill it to overflowing and the residents would be a tad annoyed. Lots of b....i...g pipes to carry the water and save the bounty from evaporation. Think how much artesian water was lost to evaporation over the last 130 years by evaporation from open bore drains.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

And the water would have to be in pipes all, or most of the way, to manage evaporation - to make a point, the Thompson at Longreach floods reasonably often, and mostly has a good flow, but due to evaporation, rarely reaches Lake Eyre. Further, the second reason that it would need to be mostly in pipes, is that there is too little elevation change for the water to flow at sufficient speed to move the sort of volumes needed. And the pipes would need to be big, maybe 100 - 1000 times the cross section area of the pipes use for the Wentworth - Broken Hill pipeline just opened - it looked to be about 40cm.

Well, we did it in the Wimmera Mallee - a gravity fed channel system was piped, and evaporation was one of the key drivers for that.

But the yabbies weren't happy about it.

Transporting NQ coastal water into the Darling river is technically feasible, in the sense that There is nothing in carrying it out that is beyond today's engineering capability. What the proponents of this and similar schemes don't appreciate is the scale of the project. It is compared to the Snowy scheme - but the distances involved there to move coastal rainfall inland are measured in tens of kilometres, compared to the thousands involved for this scheme. The Snowy scheme took about twenty-five years to substantially complete, and cost around $6billion in today's dollars.

It is probably realistic to multiply both time and cost by a factor of 10 - 100 for this scheme. Which might suggest why it will not happen. With a three year electoral cycle, who is going to start something that is going to take 200 years?

I wonder what the residents of the Queensland coastal areas would think when their water disappeared inland leaving them with a trickle. The Snowy River Valley was virtually destroyed by taking the natural flow inland and was only partially returned quite recently.

The Snowy scheme is only a tiny part of what would be required to turn the North Queensland rivers inland. The Snowy is a nice little hydro-electric scheme by world standards. We bang on about it because it was a source of national pride and something that had never before been attempted here.

Then, when all this water is running down the western rivers what are we going to do with it? Grow millions of tons of irrigated grains to sell into a glutted world market? Millions of tons of sugar? No, already too much of that. Water livestock? No, the water will cost too much to raise cattle and sheep.

Exactly!

Originally Posted by JDNSW

Transporting NQ coastal water into the Darling river is technically feasible, in the sense that There is nothing in carrying it out that is beyond today's engineering capability. What the proponents of this and similar schemes don't appreciate is the scale of the project. It is compared to the Snowy scheme - but the distances involved there to move coastal rainfall inland are measured in tens of kilometres, compared to the thousands involved for this scheme. The Snowy scheme took about twenty-five years to substantially complete, and cost around $6billion in today's dollars.

It is probably realistic to multiply both time and cost by a factor of 10 - 100 for this scheme. Which might suggest why it will not happen. With a three year electoral cycle, who is going to start something that is going to take 200 years?

Which is I like "Rampaging Roy Slavin & H.G. Nelson's" idea of just tilting the Australian continent to the west, that way all the water running towards the coast would go inland, simples.

Tilt it far enough for the coastal water to run west would put the western coastline only a few tens of kilometres west of the eastern coastline, and there would not be much point in the water running west!

Originally Posted by Bigbjorn

Well, Bob, hie thee down to Bunnings, get a shovel and barrow and a pair of wellies and have at it.

I was thinking something a little more sophisticated than that. Not in England now, you know.