Recent weather anomolies

[noises]

^ there have been fatal attacks by bull sharks in the brisbane river before this, it's a known thing that they're there, as they are in many inland river systems.

Cue the 'Jaws' theme: Fishermen are catching 8-foot sharks in the Potomac River

Bris river is still tidal up past the city, so, yeah, bullsharks are known to inhabit brackish water, and can easily tolerate fresh water. Still, pretty amazing to see a shark swimming through a shopping district of a city of 2,000,000 people.

Man did we ever get some rain last night! over 100mm in a 45 minute storm that was like a mini cyclone (hurricane.) Winds that were blowing the rain sideways took down trees at friend's houses, a bit of flash flooding around the place (we don't build on floodplains here... extremely heavy rain is a fact of life, it'd be dumb to pretend it isn't.) Storms set to continue over the week, to coincide with 3.3m king tides that always back up our stormwater drains, so minor floods in the far north expected in the coming days. I'll stay safe always do

Of more concern is the pattern of afternoon heavy rain and thunderstorms over the area that bore the brunt of the worst flooding last week, also set to continue this week, and the high tides which may see homes in Brisbane flooded again. (but a slow, creeping, high tide flood, none of the deadly, violently fast moving water we saw last week.)

Lucky for us the climate isn't changing! So fortunate the five once in a hundred year and two once in two hundred year flooding events we've seen this year, plus the extensive flooding last year, and the year before that, and the year before that are just one off, once in a hundred year anomalies, and not in any way frequent. Otherwise we could be in some real trouble.

[HairBear]

Land Shark!

Bull sharks seen in flooded streets | Offbeat | Weird News, Odd and Freaky Stories in Toowoomba | Toowoomba Chronicle

TWO bull sharks have been spotted swimming past the McDonald’s restaurant in Goodna.

Goodna butcher Steve Bateman saw one of the sharks swimming through the flooded waters of Williams Street near his bucher’s shop in the St Ives shopping centre yesterday.

[noises]

There has been looting, three cases, while the floods were in progress. In both cases people were caught mucking around with other people's boats that had been washed up by the floods. One of the cases involves a man who owns his own much nicer boat down in southport, and was using a rope and a weight to try to snag a boat that was caught near his home, he claims, to try to secure it to something, and it's starting to look like he is pretty legit. the other case was two young guys who actually were out to steal themselves a boat.


And apparently graffiti artists from all over the east coast converged on brisbane when word got out via national media that trains would be left parked at stations as the railyards were expected to be flooded. half of the city's rail cars were "decorated" in one night, that's got to be some kind of record.



I don't mind the good graffiti, the artistic stuff. Shame they're going to clean all the trains, it'd be a really interesting and very public reminder of the whole event. It's almost a shame all that urban art has been lost, most of it without being photographed, lost like tears in the rain as they say.

[ImBill]

While there were plenty of instances of this type of selfless behavior during the Katrina incident in New Orleans, there was also a whole lot of people taking advantage. My son is a firefighter and was sent down to help out a month or more after the fact. Basically, all they ended up doing was wasting taxpayer's money. The government was paying people to clean up the mess and my son said that people hauling garbage to the dumps were trying to cheat and get more money by padding their loads. I don't remember exactly how the scam worked, but they seemed to be getting away with it quite regularly. He ended up being more of a cop keeping people from taking advantage than helping people who needed help. I know there are areas of this country where the type of stuff you describe happening in Australia would happen, but there are also areas where selfish people would be more the norm.
Thanks for sharing the love!

[Pamela Vicik-Smith]

What beautiful stories of the resilience of the human spirit. Thank you for sharing

[noises]

Storms again in the flood effected areas over the next two days. 75% of the land area of this state, 25% of the next state south and 33% of the state south of that are currently declared disaster areas, due to flooding. 40% of this state has been underwater at some point in the last two weeks. Death toll is at 20, with "more than ten" people still missing. The stories and the images that have been coming out of the worst effected areas have been, in a word, harrowing.

Mainstream media has started to report the food shortages, and the even worse projected food shortages, and estimate the cost to the state's 2 billion dollar a year agribusiness. 80% of our coal mines are flooded, which means millions of dollars a day in lost exports. I've seen photos of rail lines twisted and contorted by water, useless, only good for recycling. All that track will have to be laid again before the mine industry can move whatever coal surplus it had above ground waiting for transport to the coast.

Lettuce will be off the menu for months once what we have runs out, until new crops come onto market from the southern farmers towards the end of our summer. Tomatoes are running out, 50% of the nation's beef cattle can't be taken to be processed, so meat's going up. Coal for power station may need to be rationed because of this flood, that's how serious it is. Capsicum, celery, peas, cucumber, many common herbs, all suddenly at a premium. And that's in the capital citys. In the regional centers, like where I live, this is an annual event, when the highways are cut somewhere by a flood, and we wait for trucks and trains to come to resupply our shelves. Every wet season we see market shelves go bare of fresh produce, which is why I got into growing my own food with some mates.

It sounds bleak, right? But here's the kicker. Story broke today of six guys from down south, all unemployed, who used welfare money to come to Brisbane, who sleep on the streets out the front of an evacuation center, then each day volunteer to work for free in the mud and the muck and the slime, shoveling garbage out of the ruined houses of complete strangers. For free. Because they weren't doing anything. Well a national hardware chain heard about it from one of their managers, who was also volunteering, now these six guys have tools, generators, a vehicle and accommodation with the very same people they're helping by day.

There's a group of ladies who, in shock after the floods, just started baking cakes and slices and cookies and then going to the streets where tens of thousands of neighbors are helping each other clear their streets, just handing out what they'd made to people who were working.

One of the ladies worked at the local school (which is on holidays,) as a lunch lady, so she contacted the school principal and asked could she use the school canteen, close to the flooded areas, to make more food in a bigger kitchen. A courier company came to the party and donated a few vans to erry the "bakedrelief" ladies around from street to street.

The same political activist group who collected donations to place the wikileaks ads in the NYT and Washington Post, have put their volunteers to work operating what's now a national crisis accommodation service, linking people with a couch or a spare bed with people who only have whatever clothes they were wearing when the flood hit. They already had a call center, a volunteer pool and a bunch of web hosting infrastructure and they have just been generous with it in a time of need.

And that's the big lesson in all this. I'm living in a country full of predominantly pretty selfless and generous human beings. From the hobos to the CEOs, what makes a good Australian as we wade into 2011 hip deep in brown water is becoming starkly obvious. Really quite ordinary people are accomplishing the most incredible feats of logistics and manpower, in a spirit of co-operation and generosity that has brought tears to my eyes plenty of times this week. It's hard to not feel a sense of pride, but it's also hard to look around and not see a whole bunch of other things we could fix, if we all worked this hard at it. I hope we do. I hope once the disaster is over, and the recovery a memory, that people will still be as good to each other as they're being now.

[future pather]

Whatever is going on thanks to noises for letting us know how it is there and glad you're ok

[sucahyo]

I read that you have been having a drought down and it was claimed that some were experimenting with cloud seeding. If so it looks like they might have succeeded way beyond their wildest dreams.

That raise some concern of some friend who has tool to change weather and do their best effort to make Oz dry again. They initially consider dry Oz is symptom of too many bad energy. Before float happen, Australia is said to experimenting the wettest dry season.

[Mad Scientist]

I read that you have been having a drought down and it was claimed that some were experimenting with cloud seeding. If so it looks like they might have succeeded way beyond their wildest dreams.

[noises]

Don't worry about us aussies, we look after our own and we're always at our best in a crisis. Think about Brazil, if you're in the US and you want to contribute to flood relief, help those guys.

Australians have raised over 50 million from relief charities in the two days since the brisbane flood, on top of the 60 million raised for the floods at the end of last year, and the pledges keep coming. Charities had to publish requests yesterday that people stop donating food, furniture and bedding to the flood evacuation centers as they had nowhere to store any more stuff and would have trouble distributing what they had. The reaction? A fleet of twenty small trucks and drivers donated for as long as they're needed, by a local furniture removal company, to move surplus supplies to where ever they are needed from the flood evac centers. We do look after our own

And as for being at our best in a crisis, the number one top trending twitter tag in Australia today was #floodzombie (floodzombie, someone who hasn't slept for three days, who wanders the streets of brisbane groaning something about " fressshhh draaaaains")

I the people in this country.

[noises]

Cooper Pedy (the underground town,) is out in the middle of the desert, and on the top of a large plateau. so it's not prone to flooding geographically speaking, no matter where nearby heavy rain might fall. Not that they get a lot of heavy rain in the desert, maybe once every 20 years or so, like this year, but the ground is baked so dry it drinks the water up before it can go anywhere.

Anyway, the floodwaters are receeding in many places today, and the dirty job of gathering all that precious topsoil from the farmlands upstream up off the city streets it's been dumped and trucking it into landfill begins. ...man are we dumb.

[ImBill]

What you don't know can't hurt you? : ) Reading to your post above about the vertical farming reminded me of a hypothesis that Buckminster Fuller had many years ago. He proposed building huge geodesic spheres. He figured that if the interior of the sphere was a couple of degrees warmer than the surrounding air, they would float and could be tethered. Then we could grow crops in them where they would be out of reach of insects and floods. With the right anchoring system, they could be made to be somewhat impervious to wind, I suppose. I have always considered it to be a fascinating possibility.

Nature is a very powerful force and teaches us quite frequently that our preparations for dealing with her forces are inadequate. I just watched a couple of shows a few weeks ago about the underground city in Australia in the opal mining district. I can't imagine they would fare well in the kind of flooding you are showing us.

While it is heart rending to see the suffering of our fellow humans, I can still hope that the escalating amount of catastrophes and cataclysms that we are starting to see around the world is the beginning of the change we need to make to quit destroying and attacking our home instead of repairing, loving, and nurturing it.

[noises]

interesting stat.
On the day of the initial rainstorm, 200mm (7.8 inches) of rain fell in one hour. Not in a day, in an hour. There are three US states that see less rain than that a year across their whole state. This all fell, in an hour, in an area half the size of california, into an already saturated river catchment area.

Further downstream, the dam was already at 190% capacity, and daily releases from the floodgates were slowly bringing the level down, so the river downstream was already being kept full to it's banks, because the dam had already saved the capital from one once in a hundred year flood this year.

Further large falls as the storm moved quickly east dumped more water on the top of the range, outside of the dam catchment, flooding down the 300m high range onto the plains catchment below, further flooding the coastal part of the river system by bypassing the flood mitigation dam. Add an emergency, five gates and the aux spillway all open water dump from the dam just hours before water from the flash flood hit to prevent the dam itself from being catastrophically eroded and there you have it, disaster movie floods in the state capital, in spite of the flood proof dam.

It could have been worse, it still could get worse. Another once in a hundred year storm upstream this year and the dam could bust, It's not designed to spill over the top, if it gets water over the top (210% capacity) the water will tear the face out of the dam like a breaking levy, and over 280 million megalitres of water will come down the brisbane river. Forget cars being washed away, they'd loose skyscrapers, apartment blocks, freeways and shopping malls in that kind of a flood, and a deahttoll of over 250,000 (10% of the population) would be a conservative estimate. An entire city would have about two hours to evacuate along four or five or six arterial roads going north or south, can you imagine the chaos?

News keeps saying how this flood is lower than the floods of 1974. Yet in 1974, there was no dam at 190% capacity holding back the worst of the floodwaters. In fact, the mainstream news barely mentions the dam.

[noises]

Contrary to popular opinion being paranoid does not automatically make one a nut case, it can simply mean that they know that someone is out to harm them.

Is that like...

"Nobody is trying to kill you, you're just paranoid." Orr said.
"But they are! The are trying to kill me!" Yossarian exclaimed.
"Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to kill you?"
"Every one of them," Yossarian told him.
"Every one of whom?"
"Every one of whom do you think?"
"I haven't any idea."
"Then how do you know they aren't?"

Jospeh Heller, Catch 22

Take an apple. Imagine it represents the earth. Cut it in half, then cut it in 4, then put three of those pieces aside to represent the more than 70% of the earths surface covered by water. (70% oceans, 6% lakes, dams and rivers.)

Cut the remaining piece into three pieces. Put one piece aside to represent the area of the land covered by deserts or ice sheets and one piece aside to represent the area covered by mountains and cities (human development.)

Take the remaining one third of a quarter, or 8.3 percent of the apple/earth, and peel the skin off it. and put the rest aside. Look at what you're holding in your hand, that tiny piece of apple skin, and consider this, that's the topsoil from which we feed every person on the planet.

When a river flash floods, it washes away the topsoil from the river valleys where the heavy rains fell, As the floods move they strip away more soil from the land they pass over, which are often the most fertile farming areas. The reason the water is brown is because of all the topsoil picked up by the flood being carried as sediment downstream and out to sea. It destroys not only this years crop but also dramatically reduces the harvest for years to come because of topsoil erosion. The newshounds haven't been told this yet, so they're not reporting it, but fresh food in Australia is about to become two things. Scarce and expensive.

Of course, never raise a problem without presenting a solution, as they say.
Vertical farms can be floodproofed at the construction stage, among their myriad other logistical and environmental benefits.

[noises]

16 districts in wales under flood warning. (with predicted heavy rain on top of already saturated ground in Britain too.) (UK)

Rio/Sao Paulo floods and landslides. (Brazil)

Floods in pakistan at the end of last year.

Further heavy rain in Tasmania and victoria causes more flash floods for second day in a row (Australia)


Qld river systems with flood warnings today.
Flood Warning - Fitzroy River,
Flood Warning - Burnett River,
Flood Warning - Mary River,
Flood Warning - Sunshine Coast (Noosa etc.),
Flood Warning - Stanley & Brisbane above Wivenhoe Dam,
Flood Warning - Lockyer, Bremer, Warrill & Brisbane below Wivenhoe.,
Flood Warning - Logan-Albert,
Flood Warning - Condamine-Balonne Rivers,
Flood Warning - Macintyre/Weir,
Flood Warning - Moonie River,
Flood Warning - Thomson/Barcoo/Cooper Ck,

NSW river systems under flood warnings today
Severe Weather Warning for Upper Western, Riverina and Lower Western forecast districts,
Flood Warning - Richmond/Wilsons,
Flood Warning - Clarence River,
Flood Warning - Macleay River,
Flood Warning - MacIntyre River,
Flood Warning - Macquarie River,
Flood Warning - Bogan River,
Flood Warning - Murrumbidgee River,
Flood Warning - Murray River,
Flood Warning - Culgoa, Bokhara, Narran,
Flood Warning - Warrego River,
Flood Warning - Barwon-Darling, Bourke,

And Victoria (nb, flood watch = flood warnings may be issued in 6=12 hours.)
Flood Watch for Greater Melbourne,
Flood Watch for Barwon, Hovells Creek and Otway Ranges,
Flood Watch for the Glenelg and Hopkins Basins,
Flood Watch for North East Victoria,
Flood Watch for the Goulburn and Broken Basins,
Flood Watch for the Campaspe, Loddon, Avoca and Wimmera Basins,
Victoria Flood Warning Summary,
Flood Warning - Werribee River,
Flood Warning - Barwon River,
Flood warning for Seven Creeks / Castle Creek,
Flood Warning - Goulburn River,
Flood Warning - Campaspe River,
Flood Warning - Loddon River,
Flood Warning - Avoca River,
Flood Warning - Wimmera River,
Flood Warning - Murray River,

that's a staggering 80% of the river systems in Australia's eastern seaboard under flood warning tonight. And the flooding in the Murray (australia's biggest river) will effect 3 states as flood waters in it move downstream, directly effecting as much as 10% of the country's agriculture, just on the banks of that one huge river system. To put it in perspective, the Koorong (a very large wetland area at the mouth of the Murray River, closed to the sea by permanent sand bars,) will be open to the sea for the first time in living memory once the flood get there.