THREAD. The Macquarie Marshes, an internationally important and recognised wetlands are on fire. 90% of reeds in the wetlands have burnt. Most were already dead. It's been dry for 12 months, and it's entirely a man-made drought. I was there on the weekend. It was devastating. 
This true colour satellite image from @PlanetLabs shows the fire a couple of hours after I drove past it. We drove around the wetland and did not see a single puddle of water. Last time I was there, about 50cm of water covered the road in parts and you couldn't see for reeds.
@planetlabs This weekend I was standing at the same creek crossing that was flooded on my last visit. It should regularly flood. Now it's entirely dead reeds, starving cows and roadkill kangaroos. We didn't see an egret or a heron or an ibis at all in the Marshes.
@planetlabs Richard Kingsford, a UNSW Ecologist who has surveyed the Marshes for nearly 4 decades said that in an area where they would expect to see thousands of birds, they saw only four – two masked lapwings and two pied stilts. He'd only ever seen it this dry once.
@planetlabs Slightly upstream of the marshes, we travelled through a town called Walgett. In January Walgett ran out of water. abc.net.au/news/2019-01-0…
There is still no water in the river, the backup sources of water for the community are dams at 0.8%, 1.4% and 7.8% capacity.
There is still no water in the river, the backup sources of water for the community are dams at 0.8%, 1.4% and 7.8% capacity.
@planetlabs Right now drinking water has to be trucked over 250km into town. Everything else is from bores. Climate has played a role in this drought, but more important has been mismanagement and corruption, where water rights are sold of in a bureaucracy removed from the communities.
@planetlabs This man from the indigenous community in the region called the crisis a 'second wave of genocide' on national TV on Monday. facebook.com/breakfastnews/…
Everything important to these communities has dried up. Not just culturally, but also recreational and even medical.
Everything important to these communities has dried up. Not just culturally, but also recreational and even medical.
@planetlabs His point that greed and corruption has destroyed these communities is hard to look past. Driving down we passed a town called Boggabilla, driving through the outskirts we saw a huge berm, about 5m high and over 1km long. It was a farm dam for cotton farming. There were 7 of them
@planetlabs These dams were huge and connected to each other and the river. In this first 3D model, the road is to the right of these dams. The second shows their intake from the river.
@planetlabs Six of these dams belong to a property called Royston. The cotton farmers who own this property, upstream of both Walgett and the Marshes, gets an annual water allocation of 11,500 Megalitres, to irrigate 673ha of cotton. This is enough water to cover their fields 1.7m deep.
@planetlabs By comparison, in total since the end of 2017, the Macquarie marshes have had 6,000 megalitres flow into it. This means that this single upstream property gets an annual water allocation almost double the amount of water the Marshes have gotten in the last 22 months.
@planetlabs Because of the drought the property has almost certainly extracted less water from the system than their allocation, but this isn't good, it just means that IF any rain does flow down the system almost all of it will be extracted. This map (in red) shows dams dried since 2016.
@planetlabs In this map the water flows from the NE, theoretically most of the dams from the top right of that map will probably fill up before any water reaches the Marshes (in the bottom left).
@planetlabs The drought has impacted these communities, but what has made this unique is endemic mismanagement of the river system, vested interests from farmers cultivating wholly unsuitable crops (cotton! rice! why?), while indigenous communities, pastoralists and the environment suffers.
@planetlabs See this quote from a Guardian article, where pastoralists in the region explain why poor water management has made this drought considerably worse than previous ones. theguardian.com/environment/20…
@planetlabs This problem is only spreading, and maybe politicians will finally start to care when it begins to affect big (and non-indigenous) towns. Walgett has 1500 people, and is 49% indigenous.
Armidale has 30,000. It's expected to run out of water in 400 days. smh.com.au/national/nsw/p…
Armidale has 30,000. It's expected to run out of water in 400 days. smh.com.au/national/nsw/p…
@planetlabs Dubbo, with 40,000 people might lose its dam as soon as May next year. dubbo.nsw.gov.au/news-and-media…
@planetlabs But, if the water crisis reaches a point where towns of tens-of-thousands are running dry, what irreparable damage will be done to natural environments, or small indigenous communities which have always been politically marginalised.
@planetlabs This photo is from Saturday, in a small town of 1,500 called Warren. This shows the town's wetlands. Every town we passed through was completely different to how I remember them. It was impossible to escape the dry and grey.
@planetlabs Everyone we spoke to said 'but it'll come back', referring to the water and the green. But unlike in the past, it's no longer waiting for the sky to break and rain to come, but waiting for systemic mismanagement to change. That's even harder to predict than the rain.
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