I didn't see Wilson Tuckey on Landline but I can just imagine where his
comments come from.
He was given a tour of the major Salt Interception Schemes in South
Australia, which are basically a network of bores along the River Murray
pumping out saline groundwater just before it hits the river. The reasons
this saline groundwater is moving towards the river should be well-known by
know: increased recharge in dryland areas due to past clearing practices,
and irrigation drainage water accumulating on top of saline aquifers thus
putting increased pressure on them.
His tour briefly dropped in at my office to learn about yet another
groundwater control scheme currently being built. He was raving about this
video released by the "Fed. Dept of the Parliamentary Reporting Staff", of
which he left a copy. He made statements to the press about treeplanting not
being beneficial to alleviate groundwater and salinity problems, often even
being detrimental!
Anyway I watched this video at home expecting it to be a piece of
independent information to enable our country's decision-makers to make
informed, balanced judgements. Instead it had statements along the lines of
"trees soak up water in catchments that could have flown into rivers and put
to productive use", "trees don't vote and don't pay taxes", etc.
It basically concluded by introducing this new method of locating salt in
the ground by aerial survey, using some kind of radio waves that could pick
up concentrations of salt and other minerals. This would not only enable any
treeplanting or building of pumping schemes to be targeted to concentrated
areas only, but it would also identify mineral deposits suitable for mining.
Regards
Peter Waanders
website: www.riverland.net.au/~peterw
gluepot: www.riverland.net.au/gluepot
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