* Two pipes carry pumped water from a flooding car park in Chippendale during these last few months of torrential rain in Sydney, NSW
The water from the hose out of the car park runs into the gutter 24/7, has run there for a couple of months.
I step over it most mornings on my walk for a coffee. Everyone else steps over it, too, and I’ve never seen anyone who also does that to pause, to look at it or look for where the water goes or comes from.
It reminds me of this observation from George Orwell’s essay, A hanging, where he describes a hanging he witnessed whilst a policeman in Burma:
“And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”
Here, where I live in Chippendale, the mystery I see is the wrongness we humans in Australia do when we don’t ‘see’ water when we build in the city and countryside, or farm, or walk, or live here.
The car park is a concreted slab buried in an excavation made for it below ground level where a creek used to run at ground level before the land was developed a couple of hundred years ago.
The creek still flows but is now mostly out-of-sight groundwater, forced below the concreted, paved and built on land above.
• The underground car park is to the left, the hoses run across the footpath to the gutter on the right
A nearby three story building built over the creek has a crack in it from ground to roof level. The building moves as the ground below it swells and shrinks with the varying flow of the buried creek.
The park (Peace Park) was once a place where watercress was grown and it was possible to get a boat up to it from the bay it flowed to, Blackwattle Bay.
The hose appeared during the months of torrential rain when in extreme downfalls the car park pumps could not keep up with the amount of water emerging into the car park from below and above.
Rivers of sewage also flow under cities.
Anyway, when the local council approved the carpark and the units above it some 30 years ago the decision was seen as an advance in planning. Our community persuaded council to halve the number of car parking places so as to both reduce car numbers and car trips. Chippendale is surrounded by train and bus services all a ten minute walk away and most shops and schools can be walked to. The lesser car parking numbers also meant the building did not need to be another story higher to allow the developer to recoup the cost of that additional level of car parking.
Now, some 30 years later, with the units being entirely rented, about half the car park is typically empty of cars as tenants mostly don’t have cars.
The cost of the energy used to pump out the water will appear in the tenants’ rent or bills sometime soon and the daily air pollution caused by making the energy is ‘appearing’ - invisibly to us - and felt hurtfully by Earth and her collapsing climate.
I see the weather forecast is for another 8 days of rain, so the pump, the hose and the water into the gutter will be around for a while longer.