Hey Phil and BG,

I saw that on the news here in the States. Are you guys OK?

Curt

These floods will be here for many months as the huge sea of water moves down the Murray Darling system. There aint much fall from here through a couple of thousand kilometres of serpentine river drainage.

That's putting it mildly. ~300m drop in ~3000km. A 1 in 10,000 slope - if you managed to get a pool table that level, you'd be pretty darn proud of yourself.

Damn! That sucks not being able to start the clean up and recovery in any meaningful way for a month+ after the event. I would imagine that takes a psychological toll on the residents. Just having to watch and wait.

That's putting it mildly. ~300m drop in ~3000km. A 1 in 10,000 slope - if you managed to get a pool table that level, you'd be pretty darn proud of yourself.

Video of what hit Toowoomba yesterday afternoon.

Yeah, you get caught out in that and you are pretty much fucked. Don't care how strong a swimmer you are. That is intense man.

Yeah. To make matters worse, Toowoomba's at the top of a very steep slope, with about 600m vertical elevation. All that water went thundering straight down into the (thankfully relatively sparsely populated) Lockyer Valley. In the villages down there, houses weren't so much flooded as demolished. Others were picked up and just... floated away.

Meanwhile, dams or no dams it looks like the day after tomorrow the Brisbane River's going to peak higher than it did in '74 (about 5.7m or 18 feet above its normal level). The combination of all that water hitting the city at the same time as a peak tide = disaster. At least Brisbane will have time to prepare.

Video of what hit Toowoomba yesterday afternoon. 3-4 inches of rain in an hour on an already-soaked catchment... apparently the water came up in just a few minutes. People were literally trapped in (or on the roofs of) their cars. At least eight dead so far.

Toowoomba's on top of the range, so all this water then headed on down to the valley below, leading to a general emergency evacuation warning. Even so, a number of families have spent the night sitting on the roofs of their houses, and the death toll will undoubtedly be rising this morning.

Even worse, this morning brings yet another onslaught - as I type this, there's a continuous, slow-moving band of cloud about 100 miles long and 10 miles wide dropping 2-4 inches of rain an hour over the exact same damn area.

Wait, Toowoomba is where Phil lives, isn't it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUpkPTcqPY

Shows the creek rising - really sobering video. Stay safe out there.

We are all good, House is OK, all my industrial property is fine too. Down in Tasmania at the moment guiding a climbing trip. Sitting in the backpackers watching the floods up in SE Queensland. I wanna go home. Looks like I won't be able to get there though.

It's completely surreal just how normal everything is in my neighborhood, considering the chaos that's erupting all over. Just fifteen kilometers to the south, houses half a mile from the riverbank are flooded up to the windowsills, and the water will be going up by another meter overnight. About 10k and 30k to the west and north of me the floodwaters are gradually starting to recede (Caboolture, to the north, coming down from its second major flood peak in as many weeks). The Queensland premier has taken the unprecedented step of drawing a line about a third of the way up the state, and declaring everything below that line a national disaster area - an area equivalent to that of Texas. It's not raining here any more, but it's still bucketing down pretty much everywhere else - northern and western Queensland, northern New South Wales (where a substantial disaster area has also been declared, and 3,000 people evacuated), western Victoria, and even Tasmania. So we have emergencies spread over an area at least 3,000 km north-south by 1,500 km east-west.

... and next door, they're mowing their lawn. Most surprisingly, the lounge suite we bought before Christmas was delivered. What else is there to do? We've been asked to stay away from the city unless absolutely necessary. The university's closed until Monday at least. Me, I spent much of the day substantially expanding the vegetable garden. Considering that a very substantial fraction of Australia's farmland is currently underwater and the record La Nina that's driving all this is still going strong, it seemed only prudent.

... then to add to the disjointed feel, the news keeps cutting to the bushfire situation in south-west Western Australia, where there's been a 35 degree Celsius plus heat wave and bone dry conditions for the past few weeks.

... then to add to the disjointed feel, the news keeps cutting to the bushfire situation in south-west Western Australia, where there's been a 35 degree Celsius plus heat wave and bone dry conditions for the past few weeks.

Just a silly thought...

Governments and corporations spend millions and millions on oil pipelines, would be awesome if you could just channel some of the water out your way.

We've actually just done something like that (on a smaller scale, but still costing billions) here in south-east Queensland, due to the long-running drought that has just broken with a vengeance. All twelve of the dams in the area are now linked up into one big network which can shunt water back and forth as needs arise. In a rather blackly humorous turn of events, the just-completed desalination plant on the Gold Coast (also built as a drought-proofing measure) is now Brisbane's main supply of clean drinking water since the floods have knocked out our water treatment plants for the time being.

The map below gives a pretty good idea of the situation. It shows the total aggregate rainfall for 2010 - before all the rain that's flooded south-east Queensland. Dark blue areas recorded the highest annual rainfall on record - not just above average, but the highest. Dark red, on the lower left (the area surrounding Perth, the capital of Western Australia) recorded the lowest annual rainfall on record.

What isn't entirely clear from this map is that the majority of the rain leading to these records has all fallen in the last few months.

That's a crazy map, BG. Something I don't think I've seen in a very long time. It's not a typical rainfall chart for Australia that's for sure. Much of the country, if you look at the last 20 years should most likely be shades of red. It's so insane to even think about.

This photo was taken near Uluru 2 weeks ago:

This photo was taken near Uluru 2 weeks ago:

[image]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/07/03/article-1197242-05952C43000005DC-284_634x404_popup.jpg[/image]

Brisbane before and after the flood. Amazing aerial images.

http://www.abc.net.au/...oods/beforeafter.htm

By the way, are there usually crocs Bull Sharks in the Brisbane river?

Brisbane before and after the flood. Amazing aerial images.

http://www.abc.net.au/...oods/beforeafter.htm

By the way, are there usually crocs in the Brisbane river?

fixed!

fixed!

Are you ready?
http://www.eurekalert.org/...1/nsfc-nsl013111.php

Ho-ley-freaking-hell that thing's big!

Latest satellite image. I've overlaid Hurricane Katrina, to scale.

The States is probably about 20% larger than you have it there, but still that's a whopper cyclone! Crikey!

Actually, it's up to category 5 now. Winds up to 300 km/h. Damn - terminal velocity in the standard skydiving position is only about 200 km/h.


They've totally evacuated the Cairns hospital and spread the patients around hospitals here in Brisbane. Also doing mandatory evacuations of all low-lying areas along the affected coast. Cairns CBD is expected to be more or less totally flooded by the storm surge.

Man, this is bad.

Looks like the cyclone took out Willis Island. No more radar or other weather telemetry coming from that weather station. By all reports the few people on the island had been evacuated. I wonder if the island will look the same when they go out there after this is over.

Yasi is a massive storm. It will still be a category 1 cyclone after it has traveled a thousand kilometres inland. The eye is reported to be 50 kilometres wide. It is influencing the weather over many thousands of square miles. The storm surge is reportedly going to be up to 6 metres high.

That reminds me of the cyclone that swept in at the end of the nineteenth century and wiped out the pearling fleet in Princess Charlotte Bay. Hundreds died and many many ships wrecked with some never being seen ever again. Dolphins were found 20 foot up in trees 5 miles inland.

Wow Phil, you really are an old bugger!

Wow Phil, you really are an old bugger!

Looks like Yasi maxed around 650Km wide, almost identical to Katrina's peak at 670 Km wide... and really, 10K they are pretty much the same size... and We're Still recovering from Katrina..

damn.

Yeah. But, while the damage bill will be enormous, there's yet to be a single fatality - apart from the idiot who suffocated himself after the fact by running a diesel generator in an enclosed room. Given the 3 babies that were born in the emergency shelters, we're actually up by two. Amazing.

We dodged the bullet because Yasi diverted from the large population centres at the last hour or so. Cardwell and Mission Beach got stomped on hard and various other centres got a hammering. The bana crops and sugar cane fields got flattened but as bg says no fatalities bar one who really was almost a Darwin Award statistic.

Pretty amazing seeing all the trees totally stripped of ever leaf. The hills look brown instead of their usual tropical verdant green.