Geoff Smedley
ALL indications point to the fact that the fight to revive Launceston’s rivers has been lost. These photos taken on April 1st, 2009 dramatically back up this statement.
Surely there must be an admittance now to this terrible failure in the lack of duty after a study of these images?
This is undisputable fact to the final stages of life for Launceston’s last icon.
With the neglected city water arteries now choked to such a critical level, the volume of tidal water needed to flush the area is simply not reaching Launceston any more as can be witnessed right now on two serious fronts.
The first being the extrordinarily rapid rise in silt buildup in the past weeks owing to the inevitable loss of natural scouring caused by the sudden rapid demise of the tidal volume of water that was required to agitate the silt.
The Tamar basin is a casuality of dredging today, and with the collapse of the West Tamar holding ponds adding to the already massive silt barrier, this has now restricted the tidal flow to a truly dysfunctual level.
The realisation that Launceston too could well be downgraded under a similar sentence through apathy alone.
Secondly the sickening aroma from sewers of the city is becoming ever so constant of late indicating that dramatic changes in that area are also in similar disaster mode while adding to the rapidly rising bacteria levels now rife in this septic riverbed.
