The Swan River has completely stopped flowing.
The photo below shows our river at the Great Northern Highway crossing yesterday. No water at all is flowing from the hills. A picturesque pool stops at the little sand bar.
The only movement in the waterway is now from a flicker of current when tides squeeze past the bar at Point Walter. There is no fresh water inflow, no added oxygen, no flushing of silt. This means that anything we spill or allow into the river will stay there. Any living thing in the river has almost no available oxygen.
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2 comments:
Unfortunately our river has been dying for some time, it's just been the various State Government managers who've put blinkers on the public to that fact. To have saved it would have cost developers and industries their ability to have growth and obscene profits at all costs. Unfortunately, our children will grow to see it become a toxic mud slick and wonder what it used to be like.
The Swan River trust has been trying to oxygenate parts of it in a vain attempt to keep it alive. Unfortunately it is like trying to put your finger in a leaking dam. So sad. :(
It is time we took a different approach to our Swan River and save it before it is too late. This is why I can not understand the current proposal to redevelop the river foreshore area at Canning Bridge for an elevated bus terminus! This area is part of the only remaining land that is partially vegetated in this section of the Swan and Canning Rivers yet it is being treated as "undeveloped" land and proposed to be cleared, further infilled and become an extension of the bus interchange system for Canning Highway. Surely the priority should be to preserve this area (revegetate) and allow this small parcel to operate as the "lungs" for this riverine environment (and the neighbourhood!) naturally filtering the pollutants from the air and from the water systems in this location. Imagine the further planting of this area into natural wetlands collecting and filtering runoff water from the imprevious bitumenised surfaces of the urban environment in a natural way (similar tothe apprach near the Causeway). We tend to forget in our endeavour to solve one urban problem (the congestion of buses at the interchange)that all systems are interlinked and that this land is not "unused" but a highly valuable asset! Find another solution to the interchange dilemma and don't embrace the planning approaches of previous decades when infill and reclaimation of river systems and wetlands was the easy solution to the building of transportation systems!
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