Awesome Monsoonal Floods Bring Australian Outback To Life

[hatrack]

SYDNEY — "Seven Australian outback rivers are flooding, turning the desert into an inland sea and bringing life to the once barren land. Floodwaters in three states are swirling south after monsoon storms in the tropical north a month ago fed a vast outback river network in Queensland called the Channel Country, which can remain bone dry for years.

"It looks like a sea in between sand dunes," said Kym Fort, publican at the Birdsville Hotel in the far west of the state of Queensland. "From the edge of town there is just a sheet of water encircling the town almost," Fort said from Birdsville on the banks of the flooded Diamantina River.

EDIT

Floods bring destruction and heartache elsewhere in Australia, but the flooding of the outback is celebrated, as the inhospitable landscape explodes into life. The flood, peaking at 7.8 meters (26 feet), stretches 30 km (18 miles) across and has a tail hundreds of kilometers long. It is expected to last about a month or more. One river alone, the Cooper, is now filling a flood plain 80 km (50 miles) wide.

In about a month, floods will reach the dry Lake Eyre, 300 km (186 miles) south of Birdsville, in the state of South Australia. The last flood, in 2000, turned Lake Eyre into an inland sea that drew hundreds of thousands of birds in search of fish."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-02-12/s_13051.asp

[treepig]

1. if only australia had a good army engineering corps

they could have built channels and dikes (etc etc) to control and prevent this type flooding years ago. egad, how backwards can some countries be?


:freak:

[gulfcoastliberal]

2. Is that sarcasm?

Seems like it but just checking.

[treepig]

3. perhaps more smilies were in order . . .

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:freak: :crazy: :silly: :eyes: :dunce:


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