THIS month’s soaking rain has lifted the spirits of those businesses forced to do it tough over much of the past decade due to the record dry spell our region has endured.
This week’s rare scenes of water spilling over reservoirs and smiling boaties are as overdue as they are a sight for sore eyes, and it looks like there is more rain to come.
The outlook for the region’s farmers and especially the cereal croppers continues to improve as the rain continues to fall, but the threat posed by plague locusts is never far away.
There have been good inflows into Coliban Water storages, too, coming on the back of seven months of above-average rain.
The prospects for a relaxation of the strict water restrictions that have cast a shadow over central and northern Victoria are better than at any stage for at least five years.
We only hope that the harsh lessons learned during the extreme dry conditions are not forgotten once relief is announced.
As a community we have been too wasteful of our water for far too long. We have failed to place an appropriate value on our water and we have been extremely fortunate to have made it through one of the most challenging and difficult periods of the past 150 years.
The so-called drought may well be easing as our climate continues to change, but there is still a long way to go before anyone can afford to say the drought is over.
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