Distressing scenes are playing out in southwestern New South Wales (NSW), where farmers face the harrowing task of trying to save their flood-stranded livestock.
Deniliquin farmer Louise Burge has lost at least one hundred sheep while thousands more are stranded. She’s reliant on food drops by SES helicopters to keep them alive.
“It’s absolutely beyond catastrophic,” she told AAP.
She said the flooding had been made worse by what she called mismanagement of the Hume Dam at the headwaters of the Murray River, a claim the management authority rejects.
The farmer says landowners had pleaded with the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) to keep Hume Dam at 87 percent, and if that had happened, the flooding wouldn’t have been catastrophic….