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Article: Brisbane's Threatened Water Supply

Brisbane's Threatened Water Supply

Brisbane's Threatened Water Supply

here is no money in Tuesday's state budget to stop Brisbane running out of drinking water, as very nearly happened in January.

River experts have since warned the Queensland government the problem could be repeated next summer because the problem had been put on the backburner for two decades.

Exasperated government staff say they are "pissed off" that scientists accept the problem, but bureaucrats cannot agree on a solution.

River ecologist Professor Jon Olley said on Monday night Brisbane was close to facing the same situation Sydney did in 1998, when there was an outbreak of giardia parasite in its water supply and residents were forced to boil their water. In Brisbane in January thick mud running down Lockyer Creek clogged the Mt Crosby Water Treatment Plan, putting Brisbane within six hours of running out of clean drinking water.

In response Brisbane's lord mayor Graham Quirk asked residents to begin storing bottled water.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/enough-water-for-now--if-were-careful-20130130-2djol.html

The thick silt came from badly-eroded farming land in the Lockyer Valley.

Since March, eight directors-general in the Queensland government have twice met to finalise a plan to tackle the problem of Brisbane's vulnerable drinking water supply.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/more-rain-could-cut-brisbane-water-supply-ecologist-20130320-2gg19.html

And Seqwater – which runs the Mt Crosby Water Treatment Plant – two weeks ago finalised a report into the serious problem and handed it to Water Supply Minister Mark McArdle.

Mr McArdle's staff insist the minister has not yet seen the report.

Professor Olley, from the Australian Rivers Institute, said he has sat in on the two recent meetings with the senior public servants and the directors-general.

"The idea is that they are shaping up to give a presentation to Cabinet on this matter," he said.

"But until they resolve the internal discussions within the departments as to whether the case for catchment management makes economic sense, I think it will continue to be bounced around," he said.

Professor Olley said recent examples of similar problems in New York and in Sydney proved to him that south east Queensland should set up a water catchment authority.

In 1999 the New South Wales government set up the Sydney Catchment Authority to oversee control of the catchment after the giardia and cryptosporidium outbreak.

He said south east Queensland needed a similar body because no organisation currently had the responsibility for the whole catchment, and government departments could not agree.

In south east Queensland, two not-for-profit groups – the Health Waterways Partnership and Southeast Queensland Catchments - monitor the catchment.

"But there is no-one who takes responsibility for the planning process," Professor Olley said.

"So we don't have a catchment authority for south east Queensland," he said.

"We have known for a decade that [fixing this issue] this is do-able.

"All it takes is the political will to fix it and it will be fixed."

Seqwater manages part of the catchment, but it is not independent of the government.

A major upgrade of the Mt Crosby Water Treatment Plant is due in 2014-15, but that could cost "hundreds of millions of dollars", Professor Olley said.

He said it was far cheaper to begin a re-vegation program along river channels, to fence stock from stream edges and to monitor land clearing along streams.

Tuesday's budget contains no plan to begin to solve this problem, Fairfax Media has been told.

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