Dust Storm
September 27th 2009 03:51
it's September 2009, and the state of New South Wales in Australia is covered in dust, literally. The experts say it is the worst dust storm in nearly seventy years.
Why?
Why now and not last year, or next year, and why at all?
No doubt that the lack of rainfall in the inland has a lot to do with it, but this is the driest continent on the planet. Why has there not been more dust storms in the intervening years, between the early 40's and now? What is different?
Perhaps the wet years in the middle 50's convinced the money makers that irrigation was the answer to a greedy man's prayer and much money was spent setting up ways and means of using every drop of water from the inland river systems to grow grain crops in otherwise unsuitable areas of the rural part of the state.
Mother Nature is always changing things to suit her plans, not ours, and there has been a succession of very dry years when the expected rainfall never came. The rivers are now dry, the irrigation systems are idle, but the old native grasses which have held the land together for thousands of years, are gone.
Dry, bare ground, powders with the action of feet walking to and from water sources, millions of feet. Cattle, sheep, wild horses and camels, to name the most common owners of those feet. Then, when conditions are just right, the winds come, 60 kilometres an hour or more windspeed lifts the powdered soil and it becomes airborne. Those same winds now carry that dust over a thousand kilometres from the dry inland to the coast, to the City of Sydney. Sydney airport is closed due to minimal visibility, the harbour ferries can't run, and many people with asthma or other breathing related complaints suffer.
What do we do to prevent it happening again? I don't know, I am just an old man who has seen it all before. After the big dust storms of the 40's, I believe a ban was placed on ploughing land west of a certain line so that the natural grasses could hold back the powdering of large areas of bare ground. I can't comment on how successful that was, but it all changed when the 50's were very wet years with numerous communities being flooded.
Irrigation was seen as the answer to the inland's problems.
No one, at that time, seems to have considered that the dry years of the 40's would return again. Those dry came back with a vengeance. The cycle is now complete. What will happen now?
In the 40's there was little irrigation and when the rains did come the rivers soon filled again. Now there enough irrigation pumps lying unused, to pump the flooding rivers dry again if they were all started up at the same time.
I am no expert, just an old man, and I can see no answer unless Mother nature becomes very generous with rainfall over a period of a few years.
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Comment by Wilson Pon
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