After Nearly A Year, Slow-Moving Flood In Australia's Murray-Darling Basin Nears The Sea
An enormous levee runs down Mannum’s main street. As the flood waters pour into South Australia from the eastern states, the river side of the town will be sacrificed. The other side, it is hoped, will be saved by the “great wall of Mannum”. The water has come a long way, over many months, on rivers that flow from more than 1,500km north across the Queensland border, and from almost 1,000km east in the Snowy Mountains on the border of New South Wales and Victoria.
The devastating floods in those states have taken lives, and livelihoods, throughout the year. Intense rainfall and storms first hit the east coast, filling rivers, lakes and dams and destroying homes, towns and businesses. More than 20 people died in February and March, when the damage was largely on the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range. But the rain and the waves of floods kept coming, spreading gradually west and south later in the year, with recovering communities hit again in November. The earth is saturated, and the water has nowhere to go, and so it continues its inexorable path through the Murray-Darling Basin. For South Australia, it’s become an inevitable, slow-moving natural disaster, the premier, Peter Malinauskas, says.
Dozens of homes and two caravan parks were evacuated on Christmas Day as the flood levees failed along the river. About 4,000 properties across the length of the river are expected to be inundated and more than 1,100 have been flooded so far.
The Murray-Darling Basin is Australia’s biggest river system, spanning more than a million square kilometres. Parts of it were formed when Australia was part of Gondwana; others when Australia and Antarctica split from India. Huge, shallow depressions formed in this ancient landscape, over the Great Artesian Basin, which lies under much of today’s system. On a map, the basin’s waterways form an arterial-like system. Smaller tributaries from southern Queensland, eastern NSW and northern Victoria feed into bigger and bigger rivers; eventually, the Murray and the Darling and, in the end, just the Murray.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/26/after-a-year-of-rain-towns-at-the-end-of-australias-giant-river-system-await-the-slow-inevitable-deluge