Active Planet: Australia's plagues

There's little to laugh about in Australia these days. In the past year, the country (despite what the US education system teaches, "Australia" is not a continent) has suffered more than its share of biblical plagues.

Last year, widespread forest fires laid waste to thousands of hectares - and many suburbs as Australian towns encroach on the bush. And so far this year, large fires have raged across territory to the south of Melbourne.

Ideal (for crop growing and therefore for insects) weather brought about the threat of locusts eating their way across millions of hectares. The warnings started in April 2010 and were renewed with increasing excitement in September and October with the expectation that thousands of millions of dollars worth of crops would be lost in what the government described as potentially the "worst plague of locusts in 75 years." New South Wales was expected to be particularly badly hit and the latest information from the Australian Plague Locust Commission is that Queensland has extensive populations. See http://www.daff.gov.au/animal-plant-health/locusts for more information.

For much of the past ten years, Australian farmers have had to contend with drought. Vast sums of money have been spent and much ingenuity employed - as well as fiscal measures - to try to secure water for both agriculture and animal farming. The land is, in many parts, parched and rock hard. Concern has been rising over how to distribute - and conserve - water in the country's most important water system - the Murray-Darling.

And now, that dry land is almost as large a part of the flooding problem as the amount of rain that is falling. The fact that the land has been baked into something more like brick than soil means that it has a very limited ability to absorb water or to transmit it to underground storage in the aquifers that feed much of the rural community. Instead, the water has headed for low ground, sweeping all before it. Some commentators have employed inaccurate, emotive but highly descriptive language describing the walls of water that have roared across landscapes and through towns as "an inland tsunami." Indeed, the video footage of the behaviour of the water on land is remarkably similar to the video footage of the Andaman Sea tsunami of 2004. Once it hits land, it stops being a tsunami : that term relates to the differences in speed between surface and under-surface water, a true tsunami being a rapidly moving body of water below a relatively calm surface: that's why no one sees them coming. It is different to the more common "tidal wave."

But, except for waves like the Severn Bore, there are very few things to compare what Australia has faced in the past couple of weeks as water has worked its way across the country, in some cases 15 metres deep.

It didn't happen in the USA and so the world's media has paid scant attention to the scale of the disaster in Queensland and nearby. To put it into perspective - for several days, an area the size of France and Germany combined was under water. Two weeks into the emergency, most of it still is or is under a coating of thick mud which is rapidly turning into a health hazard. Indeed, on one BBC news broadcast four headlines were chosen as the day's most important. Australia's flood did not feature; an award to a soccer player did. US TV news channels mentioned it in passing. Compare that to the reaction to Hurricane Katrina and a clear injustice is present. The devastation to many Australian towns, including Brisbane, is no less serious than that to New Orleans.

Aussies, with their matter-of-fact tones, have not been excitable in their descriptions. They have fought back tears and described the horrors of watching houses, intact, surfing the wave of flood water with children screaming for help from the windows and being unable to do anything to help.

Stories of derring-do abound: the man who got his small boat and collected seven people, delivering them to higher ground; the men who, seeing that an elderly couple had fled their home, entered it, collected what they thought was valuable and moved it upstairs, locking the house behind them as they left; the shopkeeper who, unable to get to her bakery, cooked huge batches of muffins at home and delivered them to people starting the clean up.

Then there are the dead and missing which are surprisingly few: under 20 dead so far and only about 60 people still missing.

And the heartbreaking decisions: to prevent a massive flash-floor and perhaps a burst dam, the authorities had to decide to release water from a dam that was already at 190% of its design capacity. They knew that at least 6,000 homes would be inundated and many would be destroyed. A huge civil security exercise evacuated the area. Eventually, more than 15,000 homes and business premises were affected.

It's not over, but the worst is - or so the predictions say. At least for Queensland: but New South Wales and Victoria are now in the path of highly mobile flood waters with several towns expected to be completely under water within the next couple of days.

And things are not improving financially: many home owners and businesses are finding that their properties were built on known flood plains and that flood damage is formally excluded from their insurance policies. Others are finding that insurers are looking at Act-of-God clauses to reduce the damage. Some are considering whether to try their hand as suing for the effects of the dam-induced flood (they will almost certainly lose: had the dam not kept much of the water back, a much wider area would have been flooded: it's why the dam was built).

And then there's that Aussie pragmatism: a couple watching the waters rise around their home looked around for whatever floatation support they could find. Inspiration struck and they rapidly inflated two plastic objects, tossed them into the water and stayed above the torrent, until one of them punctured. The wife grabbed a tree and her husband managed to get to her where they awaited rescue, still clutching the remaining inflatable.

And it's there that the authorities are shaking their heads - for once in a bit of a sense of humour failure. For the inflatables were the couple's full size sex dolls. There's no news on the whereabouts of the one that deflated. But the authorities have said that they have better things to do than rescue people who are larking about.

But it's difficult to see their actions as a lark: funny, yes; a lark, less so. For the dolls may have been designed for a rather different purpose but they actually meet the basic criteria for a floatation device: inflatable, floats, supports a tiring or weak swimmer and, of course, easy to spot.

So far, except for the exhausted officers who are fully entitled to turn off their sense of humour from time to time, no one else seems to think the couple did anything wrong and think the idea of surfing the wave of filthy water holding onto a sex toy is the Aussie way. And, frankly, they are right.

Good on, ya.