Raining

Ξ June 27th, 2007 | → | ∇ Weather |

Why is that news?

This is a dry continent, and drier than usual recently, with 95% of the State of NSW officially drought-stricken. So dry, in fact, that the State Government only a few weeks ago was in panic mode, initiating desalination for the coastal city of Sydney as their huge Warragamba Dam edged towards empty - no joke for the 4 million humourless Sydneyites.

As June 2007 draws to an end, the Hunter region - and in particular, Newcastle - got more rain than anywhere else in Australia, and that’s significant considering some of the wet tropical and temperate deluge magnets around this ole’ island.

June looks like ending with over 600mm of rain. Yearly average around these parts is only 1000mm! So it flooded everywhere, flash floods that is.

Regular flood zones copped it as usual but the city slickers around Newcastle town were deeply shocked as they, too, experienced unheard of inundation for suburban streets. Unheard of, that is, for anyone under 50 years age.

Every suburb or town built on a creek bed discovered what happens in a deluge, when the concrete-lined drains spilt their content into the surrounding flat-lands - now permanently coated with shops, factories and houses. It’s with some irony Newcastle City Council distributes a brochure declaring - to the brick wall that is its citizens’ ears -  that half the city’s properties - some 24,000 - could be flooded at some in the future, as in any day now.

Flooding is a natural process caused by heavy rainfall. 

Flooding has always happened.

It helped to shape the creeks, swamps and flood plains over which Newcastle has been superimposed.

In smaller catchments, including most of Newcastle’s suburbs, it only takes a short time for intense rainfall to rush down the catchment, overwhelm drainage systems and cause flooding.

This flash flooding will happen so quickly there is presently no warning.  It is estimated water could rise to several meters deep in less than an hour in some suburbs.  Flash flooding lasts for only a few hours.

Ironic indeed, and stopped the litigants in their tracks.

It was nevertheless astonishing to witness. Suburban roads I’ve driven along for for fifty years suddenly littered with ruined vehicles and flattened fences, footpaths piled with sodden carpet and dissolving particleboard furniture.

From the Council works depot in Turton road through to Garden City  (sorry, “Westfield” is too ugly a name) lay a trail of water-damaged cars, flattened fences and sodden carpets.

Most unsettling of all was the breach of personal safety and security in the city.

Metropolitan streets are a timeless zone of stability. To a child they seem to have existed forever, and even though as an adult I discover the bitumen has only been there less than a century, as have most of the buildings and shops, it still just isn’t right that the old strip should be under a meter of smelly muddy water.

The excellent image below was contained in an unsigned email circulating last week and shows our once famous hub “The Bank Corner” suffering the indignity just described.

Who’d have thought? Well, Almost anyone over 50.

Though floods are par in Australia (and the world), and country towns built beside large rivers in flood plains are no stranger to this regular visitor, the Maitland floods of 1955 stand out as a national drama of historic proportions.

That was a wet decade, the 50s. And guess what? It flooded in Hunter Street, just like the June ‘07 long weekend, as it has many time in the past million years, and will again.

Is it global warming?

I understand global warming means more severe weather, higher sea levels, more extremes for desert or tropical land, rather than simply warmer days.

The last decade in Newcastle has seemed, well, hotter. Perhaps because I’m getting older. Maybe because I live in Newcastle near the ocean that moderates extremes, having spent a decade at Maitland relishing those deliciously cool nights that smelled of green crops.

I recall, however, during that time perhaps three occasions when the Hunter River almost breached the levees at the end of our street in Horseshoe Bend.

Old timers of late have reminisced of weather they remember (or imagine), and now pine for - as the Norwegian Blue pines for the fjords. Like winter cyclones, summers that began with a hot week then lapsed into three months of cool rain. Or winters that began with a cold week - followed by three months of warmish rain. Or Mothers’ Day chrysanthemum crops being routinely flattened each year by a week of windy rain prior to that celebrated day.

Well, this month it happened!

The first real cyclone I can clearly remember since the 1970s when the Sygna was blown ashore at Stockton, or Tomago House lost that huge historic pine tree in a ferocious windy storm. The first triple rain depression to hit the NSW coast for 57 years.

Floods in Goulbourn (where the Big Merino lives) after a decade of water restrictions!

Floods in Sheffield, England - the worst on record, they say.

Firestorms in California - again.

Sigh!

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