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Saturday 25 February 2012

Disaster Porn

Well, it's all been about Cooroy this week. Who knew? First the storm , then the cleanup, and then 300mm in 2 hours.

It didn't seem so intense - well, no more intense than usual. Just incredibly solid with no let up. G-Man and I didn't realise how heavy it had been because we had the internet closed down for fear of lightning zapping the modem, and were playing music (even though it was a bit hard to hear ourselves over the din outside).

When G-Man went out to check under the house for the usual flooding it became clear that we'd had a lot more rain than we first imagined. Much of the noise that I'd thought was just rain was in fact a raging waterfall rushing from the paddock opposite, over the dam spillway, across the road and down the hill under the back of our house. This happens every time we get such heavy rain, but this was, I have to say, as much volume as I've ever seen. There's an entirely new creek path carved out of the gully this morning.  Would have been an amazing sight in the day time, but at night, it takes forever to get an idea of just how much water there is by only the light of a torch, or the occasional flash of lightning.

It's so easy to get complacent. But I'm glad I took action last time this happened and dug out the garden paths and turned them into drains. Only lost half a bed of new seedlings. It'll take a while to get it back to the beautiful neat as a pin state it was in a couple of days ago, but you get that.

They don't put houses in stilts up here for fun.

3 comments:

  1. Good to hear you came through in one piece, when there was no reply to my Txt I was worried.
    I assume The G Man is out helping all the little old ladies up & down the road. More power to him.

    We went to the L McDonald spillway this AM, there is flood debris on the top of street signs. Must have been Fkn Epic.
    What do you reckon Cooroy did to warrant such an angry & vengeful Dog? Must be all that free thinking & liberal attitudes.
    NBob
    (With Log in difficulties)

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  2. Don't have moby access out here, so I never have the mobile on. And the phone goes bung in wet weather - got to love country living. It was an amazing amount of water. Weird thing is, for all the bullshit disaster porn local paper reporting that would suggest we just survived a nuclear holocaust, or worse - most locals I speak to didn't actually notice it till the next morning, unless they were being flooded out. It was just solid rain, not particularly heavy so you'd be out looking for rising water. As I say above, it's only that G-Man went to chk on the junk downstairs that he realised it was on.

    Out street is fine - all on high ground. The last one of these was a couple of years ago, in the daytime, and it was 150mm in an hour. Must be that extra 50mm that does it.

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