Mitigation Works
Lake Somerset is a 904,000 megalitre dam located on the Stanley River (the normal water supply capacity is 380,000 megalitres, but the dam can hold another 524,000 megalitres of extra flood capacity). The site was first suggested for the location of a dam by Henry Somerset, after the 1893 floods, and he championed its construction when he was elected to parliament in 1904, where he served for 16 years as the Member for Stanley. Construction of the dam was not started until 1933, and it was finally finished in 1953. It was seen as a major job creation project when it commenced in the Depression, but was delayed by World War Two.
The same day that the notice of Billy Mateer's death appeared in the newspaper, there was also a major announcement that the State Government had approved the construction of Somerset Dam. The site had been identified in 1933, by the Bureau of Industry.
Read more about this topic: 1893 Brisbane Flood
Famous quotes containing the words mitigation and/or works:
“Law is a thing which is insensible, and inexorable, more beneficial and more profitious to the weak than to the strong; it admits of no mitigation nor pardon, once you have overstepped its limits.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)