Facing Permadrought, Broken Hill NSW Residents Show How Insane It Can Get - It's A CONSPIRACY!!!

[hatrack]

EDIT

Philp pulls up to a blue rig rising above the plain, surrounded by trucks and men. He grew up nearby, in the hamlet of Menindee, where his mum, Beryl, was born on the Menindee Aboriginal Station. As a local resident who also works for State Water, Philp is stuck between a desert and a dry place. He’s welcoming but reserved, as if he’s decided fewer words will upset fewer people. He must implement unpopular water-policy decisions made elsewhere by the New South Wales government. We’re visiting the latest controversy: a bore-drilling program searching for underground supplies.

We look on as water gushes from a bore, muddy at first, then clearer. Nick, a geo-hydrologist from Canada, takes samples. It had taken less than a day to bore a hole—about 55 meters deep—and prepare the site to pump water up through a narrow pipe from the aquifer. The scientists will pump the water nonstop for two days, evaluating its flow rate and quality.

While the drillers are working around the clock, the residents of Broken Hill are agitating for them to stop. They’re worried about contaminants in bore water and believe drilling for groundwater is a government plot to decommission the lakes altogether. “We’ve been fighting the New South Wales government for 200 years,” says Mark Hutton, a retrenched miner and longtime water activist, one of the leaders of a grassroots group called WE WANT ACTION. Chemists define it as H2O, but to understand water as a substance that brings hope and despair, you need a more complex formula. In Broken Hill, add salt and scarcity, erosion and evaporation, intractable politics and intergenerational memory, speedboats and roses. Stir and stand back because the state government is about to announce an emergency water plan for the town

EDIT

Williams, the son of generations of farmer-settlers, has been on the frontlines of Australia’s water battles for decades. To him, water problems run deeper than the elements. In 2003 he wrote an article in Australasian Science magazine called “Can we myth-proof Australia?” He argued that the national psyche is “dominated by dreams of water.” “It isn’t the drought that is the problem,” he wrote. “It is our delusions. Like the lotus-eaters, we inhabit a dream world where water is plentiful and the landscape resembles the soft, green hills of Europe. It is time to awake and accept where we live.”

Ever since British colonization, Williams says, Australians have failed to learn about the landscape and live within its means. When the “First Fleet” of officers and convicts arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788, they established camp by the “Tank Stream.” During an early drought, tanks were constructed along its banks. Before long, the stream was a watering hole for livestock, a sewer, and a drain for industrial waste. It was undrinkable. Its source, a nearby marsh, was used up and drained, as was the settlement’s subsequent water source, the Lachlan Swamps. The Tank Stream is “a classic case” of the Australian approach to water, Williams says. “We polluted it within 12 months of getting there. Yet Aboriginal people had been managing it for 50,000 years.”

EDIT

http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/the-last-drop-of-water-in-broken-hill-rp

[lunasun]

1. K&R . Good read

[procon]

2. It still makes me crazy to think that government allows private business to

pollute the water supply that tens of thousands os household depend on. From oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands, groundwater and watershed areas, these dwindling water resources are the sewers and rubbish dumps of the world.

We have rich businesses bribing governments to get less regulation so they can make higher profits by not spending money to clean up their own pollution. Those same governments then turn around and raise taxes and increase water rates to users to cover the additional costs of adding more equipment to clean the water and hiring trained workers to operate it all.

Governments pass wasteful laws that actually increase water loss by passing beautification laws requiring everyone to have nice green laws -- even in the desert! -- and giving tax breaks to water hogging golf courses. Yet they don't change their policies to require to water conservation, or sponsoring free and low cost retrofitting projects to get users to use less water.