Megan Stack on Adrenaline

I've tried to hone some small skill as a writer through my blog.  Sometimes I read back over my turns of phrase and wince. Sometimes, I grant myself some small satisfaction. Sometimes.

Rarely, however, have I been completely arrested, I mean stopped dead in my tracks, by a passage in someone's writing. I was listening to an ABC Radio podcast from the Byron Bay writer's festival yesterday (god I sound like a snob) and something really, really grabbed me.
To appreciate it, you only need this context; Megan Stack is a journalist who has covered conflict zones (22 countries) for nine years. In this interview she relates the emotional ups and downs of facing intense war zones and real dangers, and then trying to acclimatise to the pedestrian life back home on furlough. She's written a book, and this passage is about being addicted to adrenaline. The interviewer reads this passage:

"Adrenaline is the strongest drug when it floods your veins, the world smears around you in a carousel spin. Except that each detail is crisp and hard, the colours are not negotiable, the hardness of shadow and sunlight cuts you, but they feel good and real and you keep on standing. Words drift for hours and days on the surface of your thoughts, gathering like algae. Ever since the mass funeral I've had these words in my head. Killing the dead, killing the dead. People look like ancient animals, lurching over some primordial land. A single bird's cry is clean and hard enough to carve your skin. This is why people get addicted. When adrenaline really gets going, you can't get sick, you don't need sleep and you feel you can do anything. I know when this is over it'll be like dying."

The audience then breaks into sustained applause.
Wow... Just, wow.
 I'm decidedly not an adrenaline junkie; this passage doesn't describe me. But isn't that powerful writing? I know nothing of this journalist, or her book, Every Man in this Village is a Liar. I'm pretty sure I would disagree with Megan's politics, but I'm in awe of her prose.

On the Inevitability of a Serious Flood in the Hawkesbury

June 2022 Update

Regular readers of my blog may know I was elected to Hawkesbury City Council in 2016, and was re-elected to a second term  in December 2021.

I served on the Board of the Hawkesbury River County Council from 2016-2021 and also as its deputy Chair and Chairman between 2018 and 2021.

I have used my position as an elected representative to continue to advocate for my community – who endure the greatest unmitigated flood risk in Australia – and to ask the State and Federal governments to urgently commit to capital works for flood mitigation including raising Warragamba Dam.

My main writings on flooding are at my Councillor Website. You'll find much more current content there. 

Also, please follow me on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. You'll get more there.

-Nathan. 

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2nd March 2012 update: It's funny; I use a hit counter service to track who arrives at my blog and what they've typed into Google to get here. Every time it pours rain, I get a "flood" (pun intended) of traffic of people Googling "flooding", "Hawkesbury", "Nepean", and, amusingly "will my house flood in (insert almost every locality in the Hawkesbury Nepean basin)"

Nothing like a bit of rain to get people worried, is there? And it looks like the spillway will be opened at Warragamba for something like 14 years tonight. Everyone's going to wake up in the morning to the threat of bridges closed and all the inconvenience and danger that entails.

In addition to the below remarks I made a year ago, I feel more strongly than ever that people who live in on a flood plain need to better educate themselves about what has happened before. Certainly, the deluge (there I go again) of traffic shows people are interested.

Permit me to endorse the work of the Hawkesbury Nepean Flood Mitigation Action Committee, a group who have agitated for better long term planning, action and education in this area for many years. Harangue your state members. Speak to your local Councillors. Go to your Council and work out what level your house sits at, and acquaint yourselves with how frequently your area, or areas near you have gone under in the last 220 years.

Also, as a Hawkesbury/Nepean local, you might want to subscribe or favourite the other writings of my blog, as I range over subjects diverse and fascinating. Love to hear your feedback!

-Nathan

Extent of the 1867 flood in the Hawkesbury (from Hawkesbury Council)

I hate to say it, but it is inevitable that one day we will have a flood in the Hawkesbury-Nepean as least as serious as the historic one we are currently seeing Queensland, and it won't be until then that we'll get real action on flood mitigation in this area.

Then all the pollies will wail about the loss of property and life, all the residents who've moved into the area and have no idea what it's like to live on a floodplain will ask why they were allowed to build or buy in flood-prone areas, and all the Cassandras will say "we warned you for years, and you ignored us."

The map above shows the extent of the largest historical flood experienced in the Hawkesbury, in 1867. If you live around the Hawkesbury, there are two markers you need to visit. One is a nail in the outside wall of the Macquarie Arms pub at Windsor. A second is in the grounds of Windsor Public School. If you cast your eyes across from either of those points and use your imagination, you may get a sense of the scale of a major flood. The water reached that level in 1867. Now look at that map again. If you live in the Hawkesbury, there's a better than even chance that your home lays in that blue area, since our population is densest around Windsor, South Windsor, Bligh Park, Richmond and so on. And any flood will not have to be of the scale of the 1867 event to be catastrophic. This year marks 50 years since the last big flood in living memory, in 1961. It's a common misconception of statistics to think that a statistically overdue event becomes more likely as time passes, but it underlines that a generation of Hawkesbury and Penrith area residents have little personal experience of a big flood. The terrible things we are seeing on TV today will one day play out in our own back yards. Why should we believe that something that has happened many times before will not happen again?

Warragamba dam is not a flood mitigation dam. It has a capacity of 4 sydney harbours. It will only reduce flooding by the amount of storage it has available when it starts raining, which at the moment is 1 sydharb (It is 73% full) (2nd March 2012 note: It is now over 98% full and has increased by 0.5% in less than a day).

Warragamba's catchment extends from Lithgow to Lake George near Canberra. It could easily fill in 1-2 days. Wivenhoe dam (Brisbane) is a flood mitigation dam, holding 5 Sydharbs, 3 for drinking and 2 for flood mitigation. As you just witnessed this is to reduce frequent little floods. It does little to reduce a major flood event.

The rivers flowing through Rockhampton recently received something like 300+ sydharbs in a month. Talk of flood mitigation in that catchment is just that, talk.

Unfortunately, if the catchment above warragamba received anything like the rainfall recently seen in Qld, or Vic for that matter, the free capacity in warragamba would be of little significance.


So what will we do? What should be being done now?