So it’s raining… Here’s a thought

If you live in Sydney, you probably know by now it’s raining. So hard in fact the office next door to us has sprung a leak, but I’ll let them deal with that. This morning as I drove our EFTM review car this week on the EFTM Proving Ground I had a couple of random thoughts.

As I passed over creeks that will no doubt be flooded across the road for my drive home, as I witnessed Niagara Falls type scenes in the Galston Gorge and as I pondered how good the BMW 330i windscreen wipers are, an idea popped into my head.

Now stay with me.

I’m a bit of a James Bond fan and I started thinking about GoldenEye 007 and that famous dish scene. You know the one with the giant antenna embedded in some forest? Here’s the video in case I’m losing you.

That is actually the 305m wide Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, but there’s an even bigger one in China called the Aperture Spherical Telescope, it measures 500m across.

Now can you see where I’m going here…

Don’t you reckon they would make a really good water collection funnel? Say we built; I don’t know perhaps 10 across the Blue Mountains I reckon we’d be gathering a fair bit of the wet stuff. Katoomba today for example has had 41.0mm of rain since 9am. That’s great, but most will just go to waste.

What I’m saying is, think outside the circle. Stuff building dams, plus there will be no need to worry about evaporation either.

Obviously further work would need to be put into a pipe system to transport the water where it’s actually needed, say Tenterfield, Inverell or Scone that haven’t had a drop.

While there is no definitive suicide statistics when it comes to those who work on the land, I think it’s fair to say mental illness is a massive problem at the very least. 

People often refer to grand scale projects such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge or Snowy Mountains Scheme. Projects that were so monumental it almost seems preposterous to suggest such a thing could happen again some 96 or 70 years later. It could of course, no doubt someone will rebuke me but for f&$k’s sake we put a robot on Mars.

While all this may sound a tad absurd, isn’t it time to stop worrying about trees, frogs and dare I say cuddly little Koala’s and actually do something inventive? Because while parts of the country burn right now all I can hear is torrential rain flowing off the roof, down the drain and back into the ocean.

We’re supposed to be the smartest Species on earth.