Hanging by a thread

Not a fragile thread, a strong thread, but, at the end of the day, just a thin, slightly elastic, vital thread.

It is 6am. I awoke this morning at 5am, an hour sooner than usual. No alarm today – it was something inside me that decided that I should get up early. It might be a big day. You see, central Australia is on alert. It doesn’t happen all the time but we have become ever so conscious, these days, of taking a greater interest in the weather. We don’t want another Cyclone Tracy, we don’t want the anxiety and the inconvenience of being disconnected, of being isolated for lengthy periods and – what we DON’T want most of all – is to be without the essential services that we take for granted. 

Rarely do we stop to think about what sort of lifestyle we would have if we didn’t have water, the waste management and sewerage system was overcome and inoperative and, most of all, if we had no electricity. After all, if we don’t have electricity then we don’t have anything. Absolutely everything relies on being powered by electricity. So what’s the problem? If it is so vital to our needs then surely governments spend a great deal of their resources (technological, financial, human) in providing our essential needs. And governments do provide these resources, mostly. In Outback Australia it is no different. Governments (Federal and Territory) fund an infrastructure that is substantial. You see the Territory is a huge expanse of barren, mostly desert ochre sand. A lot of red sand, few people. So, supplying the essentials becomes a different sort of game. 

 There is an abundance (maybe unlimited) of artesian water that is pumped up from underground. There is an endless array of sandy soil in which to construct holes to bury the waste that we create, both organic and otherwise, but the spaces, the distances, are too vast to warrant the installation of large-scale infrastructure that would require enormous resources to maintain. So, all of these essential services are provided locally, by installing plant in the local areas. 

Each remote community has its own refuse facility, its own sewerage system, its own water extraction bores and storage and reticulation plants and its own electrical energy generation, mostly diesel fuelled – enormous generators working in rotation to provide constant electrical energy to make everything else work, including communication. All very good but while the Federal and Territory governments have the resources to build and supply this plant and equipment, what they don’t have is the manpower to maintain them, to check the water quality daily to ensure that water is satisfactory for human consumption, to check that sewage is properly treated, that refuse management is provided and that electrical generators are monitored, serviced regularly and that they are worked in tandem to ensure that each is not overworked and to provide redundancy. 

So, who is it that can do these very important functions? It is the regional governments which DO have people “on the ground” in each and every community, irrespective of their size. Natural, then, that the Federal and Territory administrations contract with the regional councils to provide these services. So, there are at least two personnel in each local community that have the responsibility to ensure that these functions are performed absolutely reliably, continually and effectively. Now all of this occurs daily without much fanfare, however, as they say in the Territory: “Rain changes everything!” 

Cyclonic weather in Queensland’s southeast has been bringing rain to parts of central NT and there has been flash flooding in places from Alice Springs to the West Australian border over the past fortnight resulting in road closures throughout the MacDonnell Regional Council area (basically the bottom half of NT). There is only one major road that is bitumen in the NT – Stuart Highway (Adelaide to Darwin), all other roads are dirt roads which change character as soon as rain appears. Rivers run in all areas and in every conceivable direction, depending upon the gradient of the land. This multitude of river systems is benign until it rains! Wet weather can instantly transform harmless, flat, sandy tracks into fast flowing torrents that sweep anything and all things downstream. 

The people who monitor weather patterns have been watching very vigilantly the evolving weather systems in the central NT area and yesterday they issued what is tantamount to a RED alert. The NT Power & Water authority has now issued an instruction to its agents (the people on the ground in each community – the Council Services Coordinator) a requirement that they submit a written report on local conditions TWICE DAILY. P&W is worried about the possible detrimental effect on its ability to supply the essential services to remote communities in the event of severe and lasting flooding and isolation. That’s why I am sitting at the computer waiting for sunrise at 6:30am so that I can survey the situation at Finke. At first light I will tour the backtracks around the community to assess any areas of vulnerability, any paths or locations that are likely to become impassable or threaten the access or operation of the major plant and equipment that provides essential requirements to the community. You see a rather simple, mundane job has been turned into something of greater importance all because it has started (or continued) to rain!