Don't have anything amusing to say about that (another 150 beds), the title says it all...came up on the ABC TV News service last evening and then again this morning on the Morning program being broadcast from Adelaide across Xmas/New Year...(didn't hear it mentioned in the local Summer series Early show with Stuart Stansfield?-Ed)...no, but I was staggering about the place this morning and may have missed it...Minister Piccolo was on and I rang the ABC Adelaide 1300 222 891, didn't identify myself, said sorry can't stay on the phone and asked that they mention the approx 500% expansion of the Mt Gambier Gaol over the last 2 years and into the next 2...
The woman said that she was aware of that but I didn't hear it mentioned...again, I'm havin' a good hard self-excusin' whinge on behalf of my knees whom are very unhappy campers at the moment, intent on expressing their displeasure to me, so the radio's on but I tend to be distracted, and haven't even seen The Border Watch since Tuesday last week, haven't left the house since Tuesday last week...apologies for missin' a post too, but I'm shamblin' about like an old mole at
a Christening...(charming-Ed)...one of Pop's many such delightful
poeticisms...it took me 2 hours to water the garden yesterday and had to use the hose to get that done, no carrying buckets of rainwater everywhere...
Statistics show that down our way we have received but a smidge of our 'average' rainfall across Spring/early Summer...(how many smidges in a gigglylitre?-Ed)...quite a few I'd think...(scientificky-Ed)...yes, I'm an expert on stuff that I make up and then present as a tested proof...(you should hold forth about Nocebos and Wind Turbines and such-Ed)...and I do...(fine-Ed)...just fine...but the rainfall stuff is a given...and rainfall equals Aquifer replenishment too, so that must be well down...(as would be wells then, down I mean-Ed)...well most wells do go down, that's where the water is...(good point-Ed)...
Not Just Because: it supports my position of opposition to the medication of the population via the flouridation of our hydration supply, but my garden clearly doesn't like the tapwater and my efforts to moderate the damage that has clearly happened in previous years (previous posts) by doing small regular waterings starting back in October, hoping to effectively inoculate the garden against the several deep waterings I'll have to do late in Summer, it just ain't happ'nin'...had to do a deep watering a few weeks ago and everything fruit wise has just stopped growing at that size...
But first, hello Macau, Italy, Indonesia, and Germany, and welcome to the blog for a very quick break-down of some 'Fracking' issues... just gunna' jump right in...and all praise the Interweb that when it comes to such issues where I don't have a great deal of personal experience, I can just direct blog-availees to go a searchin' via a few key words rather than burning half a post trying to simplify and explain things I'm basically readin' about and tryin' to understand myself...(fair enough-Ed)...
Having said that, I do have some direct experience and knowledge (backed by some researching) on the Geology of the South-East, not least of all as a result of volunteering as a Cave Guide at Englebrecht Cave (here in Mt Gambier*) when it was being run by Lifeline (1999), and having gotten myself unto the library so as to do some book learnin'...if you 'Interweb search' Englebrecht Cave you'll find a bunch of stuff about the 2 separate caves that make up Englebrecht, accessed by the roughly central collapse of what was the ceiling of one large cavern...
*This is an extremely rare feature, a cave-dive within city limits,
and should be hammered as a premium Dive Tourism experience, being only
one of many excellent cave-diving facilities/features in the South East,
a natural advantage that simply isn't utilised...cave-divers are insane,
but they're usually cashed-up insane...(my favourite kind-Ed)...yeah, relatively poor crazy people like me just piss me off...(ain't that the truth-Ed)...we must pursue/expand Dive Tourism with the Cave-Dive twist, focussing on the unique cave-diving opportunities so readily available in and around Mt Gambier...
A similar cathedral-size cavern exists directly beneath the Jubilee Hwy just adjacent, and the Cave Garden and Umpherston Cave, etc, are cave collapses through to the surface, many of which offer cave-diving experiences, ranging from the most basic, eg, Little Blue Lake, Hell's Hole, through all levels, right up to the most dangerous, eg, Engelbrecht's...in Englebrecht's there are many examples of the different forms of subterranean erosion, including two near perfectly circular 'chimneys' up through the Limestone that have broken through to the surface from erosion caused underneath (I think) by swirling water...
Wind Turbine: issues just quickly re the geology stuff,
are obviously that these processes produce systems like the Naracoorte
Caves, located along a ridgeline near Naracoorte, a ridgeline that is an
ancient Coorong sandhill as one of a series of ancient Coorongs that
successively formed as the sea-levels receded across the last ??millions
of years, etc, etc, insert fascinating geological facts here, blah,
blah, and those ridgelines and entire sub-strata of Limestone are
riddled with cave systems big and small, and on those relatively fragile
ridges are where we're planning to shove multiple massive Turbine
towers on massive concrete pads, with their associated vibrations, etc...will this cause cave collapses?...
Fracking companies like Beach Energy will no doubt dismiss this 'flawed Geology' as being irrelevant as they are drilling apparently 4kms down and therefore applying the huge pressures required for Fracking at those depths...and it's called Fracking, by the people/companies that do it, because that's what it is, fracturing the seam of Coal/Shale/whatevs, with multiple chemicals forced under massive pressure, to release/mobilise the gas there-in for extraction, processing, and likely export...(you know, I think it's just an image problem not helped by a very unhelpful name...'Fracking' seems so very, well, fractious...I don't know why they don't call it Gas Farming, you know, like the Wind Turbine Industrial Estates are called farms-Ed)...brilliant Ed...(ta, one does what one can-Ed)...
But the point being...(are we there yet?-Ed)...hilarious...point being, thankyou, that there are many well documented cases of seismic activity/subsidence/whatevs due to natural causes...(yeah, and?-Ed)...and also of subsidence due to human factors like mining...and there's exactly one shizzle-load of stuff available on the Interweb re areas in, for example, the USofA, that have reported huge increases in seismic activity immediately following Fracking extraction...over 2 years ago I remember reading about somewhere in the USofA (Ohio?) that had leapt from 1-2 very small tremors a year to over 300, nearly one a day, and some that were relatively quite intense compared to the previous events...
Admittedly, most of this Fracking has been done relatively shallow compared to what's happening at Penola, but even if Fracking is done at 4kms it sets up the potential for similar strata collapse that would potentially trigger wider seismic activity...this on top of the immediate potential for massive pollution/contamination issues re surface holding ponds, the drilling shaft itself, chemicals escaping from the Fracked strata, etc, etc, all exacerbated/threatened by the volcanic nature of the region...(is it the faultline that produced Mt Shank, Mt Gambier, etc, on through Tower Hill, etc, aka the Kanawinka Geo-Park, that causes this siemic activity?-Ed)...reckon it might be...
If Fracking weren't lunacy enough in any context, it is catastrophically stupid to do it right through a massive Aquifer in a seismically active area...it is fundamentally un-supportable to the edge of untruth to state that any Fracking shaft has absolute structural integrity because the least little earth movement will snap it like a twig...I know it's very basic science, but the whole South East is a bed of Limestone laid down over many millions of years, with a massive Aquifer running through it, effectively sitting on top of other stuff, and that makes the change in structure, the bottom of the Limestone layer, a prime point for movement...snap! straight into the bottom of the Aquifer...
Not A Blow-out: according to the SA Labor Health Minister Jack 'The Rat' Snelling, is either the $177million price-rise of the new Adelaide Hospital. and/or that it won't open until the end of 2016, at least 6 months after it's April 2016 deadline...(so $177m and more than 6 months over, but neither are a blow-out, let alone collectively?-Ed)..no, not a blowout, I'm calling that a 'Costmetic Enhancement', keeping in with the whole Health theme...(nice-Ed)...
Tomorrow: Sorry, Inevitably More Gaol Stuff
And I can't believe that I'm thanking the OPEC nations for dropping the oil price so drastically, but I understand that this is potentially/allegedly a deliberate attempt to rip the rug out from under the Coal Seam/Shale Oil/Fracking/whatevs production in countries like the USofA that has cut into OPEC profits...(I think this is enemy of my enemy stuff-Ed)...fair enough...
I am Nick Fletcher and this is my blog...cheers and laters...
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