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Today it rained very heavily, on top of the large amount of rain we've already gotten this season that has filled the lakes and ponds and saturated the ground. My housemate Trent called me at 16:12 this afternoon, he was trying to get out of Birregurra, the village we live in. As he described it two of three roads out of town were already closed due to flooding. He had packed up some stuff and was trying to get out of town on the last remaining road out. "Water is lapping at the sides of the road mate and it looks like it will be over this road soon as well. What are you going to do?"
"Well, when I get off work I'll get in there if I possibly can" I replied. As it happens, further along that road it was flooded and he was turned around, unable to escape Birregurra. Shortly thereafter I got several notifications from the fire brigade app that they were having a call out to make sand bags.
As the end of the workday approached I looked at the road closures map:
I would be coming from the east, the right side of the above map. It looks like all three main roads were closed. BUT one will note coming from that middle road from the east (the "Cape Otway Highway") there's only a small closed segment which might just be them painting a road closure further down that connecting road with an overly broad brush. OR worst case scenario I could go past Birregurra on the M1 to the larger town of Colac, and circle around to come up the C119 (rough diagram).
As I left work I texted some people in town to ask them if they knew if any roads were still accessible. Family friend Lyn Downard called me back to say her daughter Sara had just successfully entered town from Cape Otway Highway way. So I headed up that way.
It's about a forty minute drive up that road, which is my usual route. On this occasion there was water over the road in several places, which was intimidating because I just have the revenant honda civic the USS Trilobite, but as I saw other sedan cars coming my way (though traffic was very very light) which must have crossed through these, I was relatively confident that I'd make it and did. When I got to the area just outside of Birregurra that was listed as closed it was fortunately still open.
I proceeded directly to the fire station which was in an eerily unusual condition of having all the lights on and doors open, and the fire trucks moved outside, but no one there. Fortunately another volunteer was arriving at the same time I did. I was about to call the captain and he said he'd already tried and got no answer, but he believed they were at the footy oval. So we got into our firefighting gear and proceeded across Birre to the footy ground, where sure enough we found some emergency vehicles with their red and blue flashing lights, and a bunch of SES (professional emergency services) folks in their sherbet-orange uniforms busily scooping sand from a freshly dumped pile into sandbags. We got right in with them making sandbags, which were loaded onto pickups and taken to where the rest of the brigade were using them to protect houses in a lower part of town.
And then around 19:40 we were told they thought they had enough sandbags and we'd all stand down until further notice. I got the impression the SES folks were just going to redeploy immediately to another flooding emergency.
Presently it is 23:20 and those roads are still closed. I think we expect the main river that flows through town and is causing the flooding, the Barwon, to continue rising overnight as water from upstream comes down, so things could potentially get worse by morning. I'm not terribly concerned about my own or house's safety though, I'm only at kind of the base of the hill but thats enough that I'm not in a low lying flood prone area. Might not be able to go to work in the morning though.
Kolan River
Feb. 8th, 2013 02:15 am It wasn't until the howling sideways rain finished that the floods truly began. Sure, streets had flooded with the immense amounts of water that fell locally, but it wasn't until the immense amounts of water that fell inland got here that we learned what flooding truly was.
Monday morning we all awoke to a nice sunny day. People cautiously began to venture out of their houses and look around at the damage. In the tiny community Avondale (pop. 720), across the Kolan River from Moore Park, this included staring at amazement at the trees that had been twisted and shattered by a tornado which had touched down during the storm and passed right between two houses. The normally placid Kolan River was a raging brown torrent carrying away entire trees ... and a very unfortunate number of hapless cows tumbling down from somewhere up river.
Fortunately the river is in a relatively deep gorge, because it keeps rising as the hours go by, reaching heights never seen before. Power is out and neighbors are checking on eachother and helping eachother with any urgent repairs.
The nearest town (and stores), Bundaberg, is twenty kilometers away, across two large rivers. Soon people are saying that the bridge across the Kolan river just upstream, some 60 feet over the normal water level is underwater.
It's a strange sort of slow motion natural disaster. The sun is out and the winds are calm, but the river keeps rising, and from height places you can see large swaths of fields (and the farm houses in them) disappearing under water. By the evening they're saying it's the largest evacuation in Australian history in Bundaberg, that North Bundaberg was about washed off the map -- the roof of the grocery store had even disappeared under water.
Wednesday, with the waters falling John decided to see if he could get across the river. The bridge was by-now clear of water again, and looked fine though thoroughly caked in brown mud. The road was blocked off by the roadhouse, and the roadhouse owner / local volunteer emergency services coordinator was arguing with some people:
"No, I can't let you across mate, it's a liability"
"This is an EMERGENCY! And I need to get across to get medication for my wife!"
"I'm sorry sir but I can't let anyone across that bridge, see where the road is washed out right before it?"
At this point another man pipes in: "I have a backhoe, I'll bring it back here and fill that hole for you right now"
"No, you can't do that, it's a state road, it's gotta be repaired by state contractors..."
Everyone looked up at the sound of someone gunning an engine, and watched a four-wheel drive pickup avoid the road block by going through the nearby avocado orchard, get back on the road, and speed across the bridge and out of sight.
John went into the roadhouse, which had a little shop with basic groceries. He was shocked to find prices marked up 800% or more on everything. There was even expired baby food for exorbitant prices, and pineapples that looked inedibly unripe. Disgusted, he returned home.
On Sunday I drove across the Kolan River bridge myself, it was still very brown, and the destruction around the banks was amazing. The hole in the road had been filled. My friend Brian*, on whose property we have some beehives, told me these and many other stories about the floods on their side of the river. He has a small field of squash and he had brought a large bin of them to the roadhouse and placed them outside with a sign that said "free" to help out everyone stranded by the floods... but within an hour the bin had been brought inside the roadhouse and was being sold for the tremendous profit of the owner.
He did have a heartwarming story though. There was a woman who lived nearby in the forests of Invicta, alone while her husband was out working in the mines in Western Australia. With the phones out, he couldn't get ahold of her, and was naturally extremely worried. So a friend of his rode a quad bike through the storm, more than 20 miles across soggy fields and washed out roads, to go check on her for him.
Natural disasters always bring out the very best ... and sometimes the very worst in people.
*normally I'm opposed to changing people's names, but as he was telling me true stories about real people in the area I figure I better.
This is "Smith's Crossing" over the Kolan River earlier in the year. The road here washed out some previous year and was never repaired.
This is the same spot on Sunday -- except where I took the first picture is deep in the water now, probably about where that log is. I don't know what the river topped out at, all I can find on google is a flood warning on Wednesday advising it was at 18.54 meters (60 ft) and falling.
Floods: Epilogue
Feb. 1st, 2013 10:00 am
This morning an exciting dream about sailing around Cape Horn morphed into the sounds of someone pounding on my door until I suddenly woke up and realized someone was, in fact, pounding on my door.
I quickly leapt out of bed, pulled some shorts on, and opened the door. Standing there barefoot in the same dark blue shorts and work shirt he always wears was my boss Trevor. I forget if he opened with a "hello" or "good morning," I'd been awake for 30 seconds -- the first thing I remember is him asking why my smoke alarm was open. I explained it had started going off and the battery was probably dead and before I knew it I was receiving a remarkable work of on-the-fly creative composition about what would happen if I didn't get a new battery immediately, all I remember is that it involved "and then we'll bury your body..."
There followed some remarks about the status of the bees, of which I also was able to process almost none of it except "meat ants overrunning hives," "lids blown off," and "turn the nails down to hold the trays in [another short work of speculative fiction] ...and then you'll be buying a lot of trays!"
This was immediately followed with "who owns that beer bottle there?" (pointing at a shattered beer bottle under the outside stairs),
"oh, uh, that would have been Sam's,"
"Okay well he'll be back in a few weeks to take care of it then. What's with that cardboard over there?"
"I don't know that's been there as long as I've been here"
"Well this isn't a hobo town get rid of it."
And so, my day began. But he'd brought me the work ute, it was fine. Water was still about a foot deep over the road out of town. Spent the day inspecting hives. Only three fails out of 530 is pretty good! And those three had already been weak. One bee trailer had dead fish on the ground around it. Had to do some fun things like tie a rope to a fallen tree and pull it out of the way with my truck. Also one of the fields was pretty muddy, and I took note there were no other tire marks out there despite it being right next to Trevor's house (prompting me to say to myself "so you're the only one dumb enough to try to drive in this!") but managed not to get stuck.
Returning to Moarpark at the end of the day I find the grocery store still hasn't been resupplied. The mail came through though, and I had this response to some samples I'd sent in to Biosecurity Queensland:
Which is a thoroughly depressing way to end the day, because its an incurable and highly contagious disease. Even if the infected hives seem to be doing alright, one must kill the bees and burn the whole thing. Right there. It's generally reckoned too contagious to even move the hives to burn them somewhere else.
MASSIVE FLOODS - News Photo Roundup
Jan. 29th, 2013 07:57 am
I'm presently effectively on an island. Bundaberg --which is my link to the rest of the world-- is currently undergoing a massive airlift evacuation involving 12 helicopters (as well as a lot of little boats).
I called my boss and he said it's waist deep at his house, he's presently in the act of saving what he can and evacuating.
This is what the Burnett Railway Bridge usually looks like:
And this is what it currently looks like
As to the bees, its pretty flat out there so its hard to say what's high enough ground and what isn't. There are three trailers near the house which I'm sure are fucked. Most of the other trailers are in other fields in the area. Also the extracting shed and the stores of all the honey we've extracted already might be fucked. If all that is FUBAR, I'm not sure I'll even have a job anymore after this.
Anyway here's an article from the Bundaberg newspaper about the floods in Bundaberg. ("nine meter floodwaters!")
