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SES Victoria’s Tim Wiebusch is speaking with ABC News about the Victorian floods.
In Echuca, where the Murray River is sitting at 94.4 metres above sea level, Wiebusch says:
It’s a very slow, creeping rise that’s occurring there on the Murray downstream of Barnham, through Echuca. And at this stage, the Bureau is still wait indicating that we could see a peak of around 95 metres, which means a that it will be above the October 1993 flood level. So it will really come down to a matter of centimetres as we’ve seen in a number of other locations. Significant volumes of water coming into the Murray, both from the Victorian northern rivers but also the southern rivers in New South Wales.
Nearly 200,000 sandbag have now been used in and around Echuca to try to protect properties or get it ready for protection. And then to the downstream communities from there, over the coming days and weeks.
What people can expect to see on Tuesday night is an improved budget position over the next couple of years. But after that, when the budget assumes commodity prices go back to more normal levels, and when some of these structural pressures, these spending pressures, make a big impact over the latter years of the forward estimates and into the medium term, and that is not covered by this temporary near-term increase in commodity prices.
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