Denial: It's Not a River

At long last, SE Queensland has been getting some very good rainfalls this week.  There's a vibrant green everywhere, which I have never seen before in my previous wintertime visits to Brisbane.  Still, the drought continues because we are still woefully down on the annual rainfall total, which has been the case for several years.  I find the graph below, which is updated every day, especially scary.  The dams represented here comprise the major water supply for the Brisbane metropolitan area.  The largest dam is Wivenhoe, which is at less than 16% capacity.  Somerset is at 35% capacity, but it is a much smaller reservoir.  

Note that the black line, which represents the total system capacity, hasn't been above 30% capacity for 18 months.  Even with the recent rainfall, there hasn't been much of an increase above 20% in the last six months.   I find numbers very convincing.  As the experts keep saying, unless we get a weather event equivalent to a cyclone, with heavy rains in the catchment areas that last for several days, we aren't going to see those lines going back up anytime soon.  By the way, this information is freely available and publicly repeated nearly every day.

Thus, reading the following comments from the Courier-Mail web site left me stymied.  How can anyone think that this 'drought' is actually some sort of government conspiracy to increase revenue?  Why do some people have such a difficult time understanding that there are always limitations to our natural resources?  And, if you live on the driest continent on the planet, how can you not think that we have to be particularly careful about our use of water?  A few examples of The Denial:

• though that this was supposed to be all taken care of after the 1974 flooding so we don't have this risk anymore? while i love the fact that we are getting the rain is the local government infrustructer really up to the weather we are about to be facing over this year and next? the state take over of the watter supply is not going to change anything and i think even if we got all the dames full they would try to take us all up to level 7 or 8 watter restrictions... they ate now seeing that there is money in watter and in fines and while they are the government they know they can do what ever they like and every1 eats must play along. after all last time the dames got 3 months i think it was instead of keeping to the old planed time table for the higher restrictions they moved it flowered i mean really how much of a mushroom are we in Queensland? and how much longer are the government going to be feeding u crap for!!!  Posted by: Mark Brown 12:52am today

• an independent surveyor should be engaged to tell us exactly how much water is in our dams, as i dont belive the crap the government and media reports on a daly basis, and i agree with mark brown the government will tell us lies for as long as possible to extract every last cent out of us to pay for there billion dollar blow out of the water grid,  Posted by: global warming my ar@# of qld 7:29am today