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0A SECTION of a high-speed railway line that had already undergone test runs has collapsed in central China following heavy rain, the latest accident since a crash last northern summer that killed 40 people.
The official Xinhua News Agency did not mention casualties in its report today on the collapse of a 300-metre section of the railway line. It said hundreds of workers were rushing to repair the line between the Yangtze River cities of Wuhan and Yichang.
The railway line is due to open in May.
China has reaffirmed its intention to push ahead with the fast-paced build-up of the high-speed rail system, despite financial difficulties and worries safety may have been compromised in the rush to open new lines.
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North West Rail Link … Option A (Red) Cudgegong Road to Schofields and Marsden Park, about 6.8km. Option B (Blue): Cudgegong Road to Riverstone, about 3.3km. Source: The Daily Telegraph
IT could take more than a decade, but the state government is locking in a transport corridor to extend the North West Rail Link.
Premier Barry O’Farrell and Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian said they will seek to “identify and secure” a dedicated public transport corridor through the North West Growth Centre, that could one day join the Richmond train line.
As the Daily Telegraph revealed in June 2011, the rail link could one day be extended to meet the $2 billion residential and employment growth centres around Marsden Park.
Two potential corridors have today been outlined for discussion:
– From the end of the North West Rail Link heading northwest to the Richmond Line south of Riverstone Station, a distance of about 3.3km; and
– From the end of the North West Rail Link heading west to Schofields Station then further on to Marsden Park, about 6.8km.
Last year transport experts said the proposal would free up capacity on a number of congested lines and make RAAF Base Richmond a more likely second airport option.
The line would likely link up with the planned Sydney Business Park, a $2 billion, 550ha commercial, industrial, bulky goods and residential development at Marsden Park.
The precinct is expected to create 10,000 new jobs and around 1200 new homes and be built around a new Marsden Park town centre.
At the time former NSW Infrastructure boss David Richmond said the North West Rail Link would free up capacity across congested areas of the CityRail network if it linked up with the Richmond line.
The NSW Government is “determined to future-proof” North West Sydney’s public transport options, Mr O’Farrell said today.
“In addition to getting on with the job of building the North West Rail Link, we’re determined to secure a corridor for its future expansion,” he said.
“Setting aside land now means families in Sydney’s North West will have room for the public transport infrastructure they’ll need in the future.”
More than 200,000 people will move into the North West Growth Centre over the next 25 to 30 years – that’s around 70,000 new houses in the Riverstone, Schofields and Marsden Park areas, the state government said.
“We need to be ready for this growth, and the NSW Government is getting on with the job of planning a prosperous future for Sydney’s North West,” Mr O’Farrell said.
The North West Rail Link is unlikely to be in operation for another decade, with construction not to start until at least 2015. It will have eight new stations along a 23 kilometre route from Epping to Rouse Hill.
The 15 kilometre tunnels between Epping and Kellyville will be the longest rail tunnels ever constructed in Sydney.
Last year the state government said the line will have a skytrain line which would allow roads and some houses to remain in place without the need to do zoning work.
It will also have around 4000 new car parking facilities.
ABC © Enlarge photo
CSIRO scientists say invisible toxic pollutants are fouling the atmosphere, even in the world’s cleanest air at a monitoring station in far north-west Tasmania.
The category of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) includes DDT, pesticides and dioxins, and as the name suggests they do not dissipate easily.
They are being detected even at Cape Grim station, in far north-west Tasmania, one of the most important research sites for the pollutants in the world.
While people may never heard of them, senior CSIRO scientist Melita Keywood says it is important to keep monitoring them and eliminate new dangerous compounds.
“They can have quite a bad impact on human health,” she said.
“For example, they can result in reproductive problems for people, and they can also impact people’s respiratory health and heart function.”
Dr Keywood says the pilot program monitoring atmospheric pollution should be extended beyond its current three-year timeline.
“We’re hoping that this’ll continue for a very long period of time because we need to know long-term trends,” she said.
“We need to know if these compounds are being removed from the atmosphere over a long period of time.”
She says the air is very clean off Cape Grim because it has not been in contact with land for a long time.
But even at Cape Grim there are signs of persistent organic pollutants that may have been used on the other side of the world.
“If we see some of these pollutants in samples we’re collecting, that tells us that they’ve been able to circulate right around the globe to get to the background air atmosphere,” Dr Keywood said.
“[There are] things like dioxins and pesticides, some pesticides that have been used in the past.
“They’re also things like fire retardants and also PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) – so things that have been used in the past a lot and are still being used today.”
Cape Grim research centre manager Sam Cleland says the centre is uniquely placed to do an important global job.
“It’s one of the most important places to measure what the global pollution levels are because what we get is mixed right through the whole world,” he said.
“We’re perched over a hundred-metre tall cliff and when we look west the nearest land is South America.”
Updated
Flood engineers say the huge floods that devastated Brisbane last year could also happen on a similar scale in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, the Gold Coast and Newcastle.
They argue that thanks to Australia’s three levels of government, flood planning around the country is patchy at best, allowing for houses to be built where they should not.
On Wednesday, ABC Radio’s PM aired the first of a two-part look at Australia’s flood planning. Now it looks more broadly at how well Australia is prepared for flooding and the battle between development and nature.
Last week Federal Minister for Emergency Services Robert McLelland stood on a levee bank as floods surrounded the southern Queensland town of Charleville. He liked what he saw.
“We’ve literally stood up on the levee bank – dry on one side – looking over the moving water on the other,” Mr McLelland said.
“It unquestionably, unquestionably saved the town and I think from the long-term point of view of resilience, we need to methodically go through these areas that have been effected and look at mitigation steps we can take.”
Talk to any flood engineer and they will tell you that is an admirable proposal, but they want more.
Steve Molino, a consultant who has advised on flood plain planning for 20 years, says places which have not flooded recently also need to be examined.
“You do need to look at the places that have flooded but you also need to look at the places that did not flood,” he said.
“There’s many places in Queensland that got out of the floods this year and got out of the floods last year scot free, but are at just as much risk of flooding as many of the places that flooded last year or this year.
“Those places need to be encompassed in any studies that are done.”
And that is just Queensland.
Mr Molino says the potential flood risk across all of Australia is “huge”.
Hayden Betts, who has a PhD in flood plain management and works for KPR consulting engineers in Brisbane, agrees.
“I’m not sure how many hydrologists and hydro-engineers there are in the country – must be a thousand or two. If they applied their mind to it, I think there’d probably be enough work to keep them going for a decade or three,” he said.
But Mr Molino says Australia’s flood preparation is patchy.
“We have places where there are good structural works in place; there are places where structural works are needed,” he said.
“There are places where there is good town planning place; there are many places where better town planning is needed.”
All our major cities have been built for historical reasons around rivers and on flood plains, so there are parts of our cities where we really do need to rethink whether those areas should be vacated and put over to other uses.
Steve Molino
And therein lies the big problem – just who is responsible for planning and dealing with floods in Australia?
“The responsibility falls to local, state and federal government but it varies around the country,” Mr Molino said.
Steve Opper, the director of community safety with the New South Wales State Emergency Service, thinks New South Wales has got the balance about right.
“Our situation I believe is extremely robust,” he said.
“The State Emergency Service in New South Wales is unique nationally in that we control the management of floods in an emergency context all the way from state level to local government level.
“In other jurisdictions, quite often it might be just the local council that’s responsible for planning and they may just not have enough expertise to do that.”
Money is also an issue.
Take the problem of levees – the raised banks which can protect towns from floods.
Often state governments might provide the funds to build levees but then leave it to local government to do the maintenance.
“There are levees that have been built, have settled over decades and are now providing a lower level of protection than they were originally designed to provide,” Mr Molino said.
“And there are many levees that have just been left to their own devices; there’s been no maintenance undertaken on them and therefore there’s cracks appearing in them, there’s trees growing in them.”
Then there is the problem of protecting our big cities.
Mr Molino points to the fact that there have been a number of one-in-a-thousand flood events in Australia in the past five years.
Luckily they have been in sparsely-populated areas, but Mr Molino says the damage would be far worse if a rare flood were to occur in a bigger city.
“If a flood of that frequency were to occur somewhere like the Gold Coast, on the Hawkesbury Nepean river or on the Georges River – they’re major rivers running through Sydney – floods of that type of frequency, and they do occur around the world all the time, were they to occur in one of those areas, we’re talking about tens of thousands of houses under water and many of those homes washed away,” he said.
“And Melbourne is not immune. Melbourne has the Yarra and the Maribyrnong River and other rivers – as Melbourne expands – going into other catchment areas.
“The Torrens through Adelaide hardly ever flows, but it can flood.
“The Swan River in Western Australia.
The balance between how much development we put in an area and the flood risk is a very complex one; between what you can achieve to create housing and places for people to live against the risk that you place when you live almost anywhere.
Steve Opper
“All our major cities have been built for historical reasons around rivers and on flood plains, so there are parts of our cities where we really do need to rethink whether those areas should be vacated and put over to other uses.”
For Mr Opper, who has drawn up the plan for evacuating tens of thousands of houses in western Sydney, proper town planning is part of flood preparation.
“The balance between how much development we put in an area and the flood risk is a very complex one; between what you can achieve to create housing and places for people to live against the risk that you place when you live almost anywhere,” he said.
Last year, the state and federal governments signed off on a national strategy for disaster resilience, which deals with floods.
It makes note that all levels of government must share the responsibility.
But some people believe that system does not work.
Dr Anthony Bergin, the director of research at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says the Federal Government should be taking the lead.
“Now’s the time for the Commonwealth to take a leadership role in natural disaster planning, particularly flood plain planning,” he said.
“The new Federal Emergency Management Minister Robert McLelland needs to be arguing an economic case for disaster mitigation around micro-economic reform, because a dollar spent in mitigation – flood mitigation – does save somewhere between two and $10 in reduced disaster response and recovery costs.
“And this could be the opportunity for him to leave a legacy of national leadership around disaster management.”
Topics: floods, emergency-planning, federal-government, states-and-territories, local-government, australia, sydney-2000, surfers-paradise-4217, adelaide-5000, melbourne-3000
First posted
The federal opposition does not support a super regulator for the Australian media because that would repress free speech, opposition communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull sa lateline
A five-month-long independent media inquiry, headed by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, recommended that a government-funded News Media Council should be created to regulate print, online, radio and television news in Australia.
But Mr Turnbull told the ABC’s Lateline program he would not support the recommendation, saying the country should be able to trust competition and a diversity of voices to regulate its media.
“I think it would be bad for freedom of speech; it would repress freedom of speech,” Mr Turnbull told Lateline on Friday night.
“We don’t support the recommendation; it (the report) only had one recommendation of any consequence, which was to set up a new super regulator for news media, a news media council, and we’ve said we don’t support that.”
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