I can't give you a weather report for home, cos I'm not in South Oz atm, where there's drought; the dams and reservoirs are dry; there's no feed for stock; crop growers are dry seeding in the hope of getting
some rain before it gets too cold for the seed to grow & so that their soil doesn't wash away when it does rain next; and the sort of thing shown in the pic below is becoming commonplace:
Instead, me'n the Child Bride are half the Country away, in Southern NSW, where we've been visiting the Wife's aging and unwell Mother. But we had to bolt, as this arvo everyone was told to prepare to evacuate because the rain band that's caused the extensive and catastrophic flooding in Northen NSW has moved South and has already started unloading a deluge of epic proprtions!
There's many thousands of homes underwater up North of us (about 10,000), where some places have received over 1.6 metres of rain so far, with 1/2 a metre of rain in less than the last 48 hours, with just as much forecast again over the next day or so; and many of the rivers are flooding at over 14 metres above normal levels, 6 metres above previous record flood levels!! Luckily (for everyone else anyway!) only 5 people have been confirmed drowned so far, but there are tens of thousands in the Evacuation Centres, some after being moved to higher ground twice already, and quite a few people still unaccounted for, so that number of drowned may well rise!
We have commitments in South Oz that mean we had no choice but to leave immediately we got the Prepare to Evacuate warning, in order for us to stand any chance of making it back before we got flooded in; but at least there's lots of local family to look after Mum, and they are all already (hopefully) safely well above the reach of most foreseeable floodwaters, but with what Northern NSW is currently drowning in, who knows?!
Anyhow, we're on the road, and so far, we've been able to cross all the creeks & rivers that are rapidly heading towards flood levels. With any luck, we'll be over the Great Dividing Range and heading back home across the Plains and into drought striken South Oz well before any major flooding catches up with us, but the main roads out of here (those with bridges etc!) are all to the North, and they are already under water, so we have had to head South and West on minor roads & tracks and hope that we can get past/thru the many un-bridged rivers and creeks that we'll need to cross as we go up and over the Divide!! They've all been open/fordable so far, but the rain
is pelting down onto already soaked ground, producing maximum run-off, and that means that many of the crossings we've done already have been close to their (and to our!) maximum fording depth! And once we're over the top, there's still all the Western running creeks & rivers that will still be getting fed by the rain and floods behind us!!
So the weather report here where I am right now is 'cold and very wet'; temps in the mid single digits in °C atm; likely to drop to 1 or 2°C as we climb over the Divide and the night progresses; but at least it
probably won't snow - it's waaaayyy too wet right now, and the wind is strong and gusting to about 100 kph. Still, I've got snow/mud chains, a chainsaw, and a (small) winch as well as my usual recovery/unditching gear, so we should be OK... But it is feeling a whole lot like we're gonna have a fairly intense trip home!! For once, I'm glad we're in the 4WD and not on the Spyder!
Later Edit: Drove into the night last night, and with a little work out of the 4WD in the cold and still teeming rain, managed to get thru all the critical, potential trip stopper crossings & tracks! I'm pretty sure that no-one else was going to be coming thru those after us tho! The last couple of crossings were getting a bit hairy as the flood level and water flow rate was and still is rising; and we only just managed to squeeze thru on some tracks after trimming a few large branches off some pretty big trees that'd been downed, only there's more of them down now, so they will likely be impassable even if the crossings aren't, and we did all that we did
before the real wind & rain set in!
However, we're now thru all that, and parked up at friends place for a while to rest up a bit. From here on, we can afford to take things a bit easier and still get the rest of the way home comfortably for those appointments on Tuesday that I can't miss!
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. Most of us, myself included, have never experienced this problem. (Flooding issues) post #30.
