On this side, venerable Dunedin emeritus professor Sir Alan Mark was knocking back suggestions from Meridian Energy that more water could be taken from Lake Manapouri to provide a buffer for electricity generation to ensure security of supply in the next looming power crunch.
Sir Alan, the first chairman of the Guardians of Lakes Manapouri, Monowai and Te Anau, says there is no need to muck about with the lakes and draw then down below their absolute minimum levels.
Even dropping the lake levels by just a few tens of centimetres infrequently and for a short period of several days would be enough to cause lasting damage to lake beaches and interrupt shoreline processes, he says.
There is no doubting that, as our electricity generation network starts to get squeezed again with autumn’s onset bringing increased demand, and likely power station assets being offline, there needs to be a plan to ensure it doesn’t all turn to custard one very frosty morning in June.
However, these lakes need to be left alone. There are other South Island hydro lakes which could be lowered with less chance of such permanent environmental damage, though that wouldn’t be ideal either, being also likely to cause local ecological repercussions.
Too little water is absolutely not the issue some 2500km northwest across the Tasman. There, the late Cyclone Alfred lingered and lingered just offshore of Brisbane and the Gold Coast, taking up residence and long outstaying its welcome, if ever it was welcome, and dropping gobsmacking rainfalls of more than 1 metre in parts of the coastal hinterland.
While New Zealand was debating how low its already falling lakes could go, former Dunedin couple Janine and Scott Blackler living between the Gold Coast and Brisbane were busy each day bailing rainwater out of their swimming pool to stop it flooding their property.
Severe thunderstorms embedded in the dying cyclone’s rainbands boosted daily rainfalls over the weekend, with Hervey Bay receiving 100mm of rain in just an hour on Sunday. Brisbane had its wettest day since 1974, with 275.2mm in the 24 hours to 9am on Monday.
Alfred brought strong and gusty gales to some places along the southern Queensland and northern New South Wales coasts, but the one saving grace from having a slowly decaying cyclone on your doorstep was the winds never reached the extreme speeds which would be experienced in an intense and more mobile category 3 or higher tropical cyclone.
However, the damage from the days and days of Alfred’s onslaught is immense. Sodden ground has allowed trees to be easily uprooted and topple, bringing down power lines across the region and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of people.
Rivers are running high and overtopping banks, causing flooding and dangerous travelling conditions for many. Sheets of water draining across muddy land, storm surges and high seas have resulted in major erosion along the coast, with easy access to once pristine sandy beaches scoured away and long stretches of smooth sand completely gone.
The people of these hardest-hit areas have lived through an utter nightmare in the past week and will do for months yet, one made worse by the anxiety of waiting for Alfred to arrive and by its persistence.
Alfred was quite a different beast from New Zealand’s most recent devastating tropical cyclone, Gabrielle, which hit the North Island’s east coast in February 2023, killing 11 people and causing damage of close to $15 billion.
Gabrielle was a more extreme tropical cyclone than Alfred, though in some ways a much more predictable one. The computer modelling on which those warnings were based appeared to cope better with picking the likely track of a faster-moving system like Gabrielle than a maverick like Alfred with its stop-start-slow drift to reach shore.
Despite that curve-ball, the Australian emergency preparedness and response appears to have been excellent. One death is one too many, but it could have been so much worse than that.
