Anne Davies - September 25, 2006 – www.smh.com.au

Extreme conditions … smoke and embers envelop firefighters at South Maroota yesterday.

WIND gusts of 100kmh brought down power lines and left more than
120,000 people without power yesterday in western Sydney, on the South Coast and in the Southern Highlands.

Some could be waiting until later today for it to be restored.

The gale-force winds sent trees, branches and roofing iron into power lines, causing blackouts. In Bowral, the wind tore the roof off Integral Energy’s base, making it doubly difficult for workers trying to deal with repairs.

“Because of the extreme bushfire conditions, lines have to be manually inspected before power could be turned back on,” said Integral’s manager of corporate affairs, Kate McCue.

She warned there could be lengthy delays before services were restored.

“It’s one of the worst windstorms in the company’s history,” she said. “We’re apologising to our customers on behalf of mother nature.”

Priority was being given to restoring power to villages in the Southern Highlands to ensure traffic lights and emergency services could operate.

Integral established storm centres in Shellharbour, Coniston, Nowra, Hoxton Park, Penrith, Parramatta and Bowral.

A further 30,000 Energy Australia customers were without power, mainly in the Hornsby, Dural and Pennant Hills areas and on the Central Coast, but its network did not seem as severely affected.

A spokesman, Alistair Kingston, said most of the damage was to low-voltage power lines, and that crews were in the area and restoring service as fast as they could.

“As we get reports of power lines down, the first priority is to make safe the lines and then to restore service,” he said.

“The message is stay well clear of any downed power lines.”

The Bureau of Meteorology issued a severe wind warning for yesterday evening for much of the state, saying it expected widespread, hazardous winds averaging more than 65kmh gusting to 100kmh. By 6pm, that maximum had been exceeded in Penrith, Richmond and Bellambi. Sydney Airport registered a maximum gust of 98kmh.

The State Emergency Service said it had received as many as 2000 calls for assistance before the expected southerly change last night. By 7pm, the Rural Fire Service commissioner, Phil Koperberg, said the worst of it was over.

SMH - December 28, 2006

Telecommunications across Asia were slowly being restored on Thursday after earthquakes off Taiwan damaged cables and knocked thousands offline, but access in parts of South Korea and Taiwan was still patchy.

Most of Asia’s telephone traffic was restored while internet access in many countries had also improved, a day after businesses and home users from Seoul to Sydney were hit by one of the most widespread tech disruptions in Asia.

South Korea’s top fixed-line and broadband operator KT Corp. said six submarine cables owned by a consortium of telecoms firms had been disconnected on Wednesday, knocking out thousands of telephone and broadband connections.

For the full article click here.

Apart from the environmental impacts, climate change affects businesses in various ways, for example:

Loss of Customers and market share

Consumer Preferences are changing. Lagging action will become a larger issue as consumer concerns and preferences shift. A recent study identified the airline, food and beverages sectors as the most vulnerable to reputation damage due to climate change inaction and concluded that climate change would become a mainstream consumer issue by 2010.

Legal Risks

Lawsuits and fines are becoming more common. Similar to the multi-billion dollar lawsuits against the cigarette industry, no industry will be exempt from legal action if they continue to have a huge impact on GHG emissions and are not being seen to be improving their operations. E.g. The State of California has sued GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota and Nissan, on the grounds that greenhouse gases from the companies’ vehicles have caused billions of dollars in damages. In the UK, six companies including Mars, were given fines for not doing enough to curtail their emissions.

By Marian Wilkinson, Tom Allard and Stephen Gibbs - August 1, 2005 - www.smh.com.au

Police will ask the new premier for extra powers and put forward plans to evacuate Sydney city centre as part of their anti-terrorism strategy.

The plans in the event of an attack include procedures for clearing the central business district or instructing people to stay at work until transport and communications have been restored.

The counter-terrorism commander of NSW Police, Deputy Commissioner Andrew Scipione, said the evacuation planning required police to imagine the worst that could happen.

The incoming premier, Morris Iemma, will be asked to widen police search and seizure powers and increase their counter-terrorism resources.

In a separate development, hundreds of Sydney detectives have been ordered to wear uniform or don a fluorescent vest and walk the beat for an hour every day.

The directive is a response to last month’s London bombings and asks local commanders to use all officers, specifically detectives of all ranks, to patrol busy transport interchanges and other important infrastructure.
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The directive, from Acting Deputy Commissioner Terry Collins, applies to hundreds of detectives from 46 local area commands. They cover 98 stations, including Sydney Airport, and those policing landmark terrorism targets on the harbour and in the city centre.

Mr Scipione said that under the proposals to be put to the new premier, the police would have overarching responsibility for any evacuation.

The outgoing Premier, Bob Carr, said the decision to put the police in charge came after the panic caused by a suspected gas leak at Town Hall station last year, which caused the rail network to be shut down.

The proposed legislation is likely to call for an expansion of search and seizure powers for police. It is expected to allow random bag searches and might reduce legal curbs on searching the property of suspects.

It is expected to propose deploying more police with counter-terrorism training and expertise in monitoring transit systems. There is also a push for more police sniffer dogs.

Mr Scipione said he was still working on the proposals and that the Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney, would have the final say before they were presented to the new premier.

He said in the event of an attack or disaster it was important to have clear lines of command, and it had been decided that police, not the Premier’s Department or the Fire Brigade, for example, would head that structure.

The command - and personnel from the emergency response agencies - would work together in one place.

“You can only have one team in command,” Mr Scipione said, “You look at London or Madrid, you look at any major event, the community usually look to the police to co-ordinate the disaster recovery arrangements.

“The evacuation plan doesn’t necessarily mean you need to move thousands of people out,” he said. “It may well be that they stay right where they are until we get the transport moving again.”

The time taken to evacuate Town Hall station after the gas leak raised serious concerns for the Government. RailCorp plans to remove all shops from the station’s concourse and its engineers are looking at ways to make it easier for large numbers of people to get into and out of the station.

A senior detective at an Inner Metro command said the extra patrols by detectives were an unwanted demand on criminal investigators who were already overworked and constrained by overtime limits. “The bottom line is detectives haven’t got the time to do that,” he said.

Assistant Commissioner Bob Waites, commander of the Inner Metro region, has just returned from London and supports the patrols.

Anne Davies and John Garnaut - October 25, 2006 - www.smh.com.au

NSW faces blackouts and skyrocketing electricity prices within five years unless it increases supply, the national energy market regulator has warned.

In a report to be released today, it forecasts that demand for electricity in the state could outstrip supply by 2010-11, causing the network to fall below its tough reliability standards.

The forecast for NSW and other states will again focus debate on how Australia should meet its power needs in the face of mounting evidence about the effects of climate change on farming, tourism and other industries.

Today the federal and Victorian governments will announce funding to help build one of the world’s biggest solar power stations, a $400 million project that will be a key part of the national strategy to fight climate change.

The federal Treasurer, Peter Costello - who has previously dismissed the prospect of Australian nuclear power as commercially unviable - shifted his position yesterday. He said a nuclear plant would be built as soon as it became commercial, and that was possible within 10 years.

Australia’s greenhouse emissions are among the worst in the world - 3.41 tonnes of CO2 per capita - according to a report released yesterday by the conservation group WWF.

NSW’s energy demand is being fuelled mainly by air-conditioning - a standard feature in new homes - which leads to bigger and more frequent peaks in demand in summer, according to the report by the National Electricity Market Management Company.

NSW’s demand is projected to grow by 0.2 per cent in the year to June 2007, but the number of summer days with a 10 per cent or more likelihood of exceeding the network’s reliability standard is forecast to rise by 2.7 per cent.

Mainland states depend mainly on greenhouse-causing coal, although NSW is turning to gas-fired plants to meet the increasingly sharp peaks in demand. Gas-fired plants are more expensive to run but have about half the emissions and are more suited to peak demand. But the rising population will mean more need for baseload power to meet everyday needs, which are currently met by coal-fired stations running 24 hours a day.

The regulator is responsible for managing the wholesale electricity market, following the introduction of a national trading system. Its predictions are notoriously conservative, based on the worst case, such as the failure of a power station on a hot day.

NSW is not the most vulnerable state. South Australia faces potential power shortages as early as 2007-08 and Victoria a year later.