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Old 27th Apr 2021, 05:39
  #4546 (permalink)  
ExtraShot
 
Join Date: Jul 2015
Location: Lagrangian point 2
Posts: 282
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Originally Posted by kiwi grey
I doubt that very much.
You are talking about building a small township for a thousand or more transients* in quarantine, plus permanent staff.
Even assuming the Commonwealth decided to simply ignore any requirement for planning permissions, consultations with stakeholders, environmental impact statement, etc - and I think that would be political suicide - you still have to manage the infrastructure issues: roading, electricity, potable water and sewage treatment & disposal. Roading is almost trivial.
The Commonwealth will have to
  • negotiate with a lines company to add a point load of some megawatts into a network probably designed to handle a farm every kilometre or so, and then get them to design and build it.
  • find a source of potable water, negotiate a supply agreement with the owner and design & build a pipeline to your camp site, probably build an on-site reservoir to give a surge/emergency/firefighting supply too or design and build a complete water supply and treatment system.
  • conceptualise, then design and build, a sewage/wastewater treatment plant and outfall.
These are not off-the-shelf purchases, they take months and months and gobs of money to do.
And if the Commonwealth were to go through the normal planning processes, add at least another three to six months.

Sorry, this is at least a twelve to eighteen months' project.

* If you are only going to take one planeload a week - A330 size, empty middle seats, say 150 SOB - and working on a sixteen day cycle (reception day, fourteen days quarantine, cleaning day) - you are going to need four hundred to four hundred and fifty beds. A thousand beds only gets you two flights a week, occasionally three. Daily flights, you're looking at two to two and a half thousand beds.


12-18 months? John Wagner does not agree;

Wagner Corporation chairman John Wagner said the first 500 beds could be built in as little as five to six weeks and his family-owned firm has put a “comprehensive and commonsense” proposal on the table which would provide a safe alternative to hotel quarantine
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fede...04-p56zn3.html

this bloke built an airport, in Australia, in spite of all our bureaucratic and regulatory madness, in record time. It CAN be done, if there’s a will to do it.




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