Floods

12/02/2020 

As I said, what a weird country we live in. One minute we are in the middle of a catastrophic bushfire season and now the drought has broken and we are in the middle of floods. I heard on the radio that rain has fallen on a station way out west for the first time in nine years. Most of the fires are out now. The Gospers Mountain and Wollombi National Park fires, which started in October last year, are finally out. There are still a couple of fires burning down the south coast but they have been downgraded due to the rain falls. Guess who is claiming a job well done in taming these fires, non-other than our gallant leader who wasn’t even in the country at the peak of the crisis.

We have had heavy falls, complete with lots of thunder and lightning.  There is nothing like rain to start the garden growing again. We have lost some trees, bushes and plants due to the extreme heat but the rest of the garden is growing like crazy. Admittedly it is very wet and mushy underfoot and it will some time before I can cut the grass.

Last Friday was Alex’s birthday but the weather was so bad that we put off our trip to see him until the following day. Di made him a birthday cake so we set off to deliver it but crossing the river bridge we noticed that the water level had risen considerably. We would have to listen out for flood warnings.  We didn’t stay too long with the birthday boy due to the concerns about water levels. Driving home we got as close as 500mts from North Richmond bridge before they closed the road. Blast!! 

What to do now. We have two choices, go back and stay at Beckys for an unknown period waiting for the floods to recede or drive the long way around through the Blue Mountains. We decided on the second option so filled up with petrol and headed for the hills. The conditions were atrocious, very high winds and driving rain. All the way up the mountains as far as Mount Victoria, across the ridge to Bell and down the Bells Line of Road to North Richmond. We drove through lots of water over the roads, waited while fire brigades cleared fallen trees and pumped water off roads and four hours later arrived home. It was a welcome relief to be free of the constant noise of lashing rain, windscreen wipers going flat out and water off the road surface hitting the underside of the car. It was strange to see this section of road so busy then we realised that people who had be caught on the opposite side of the river bridge to us had also to find a way home. 

It’s now four days later and the bridge was reopened this morning although the bridge in Windsor is still closed. A BIG red face for the state government as the new bridge in Windsor, built at huge cost and in the wrong place would have been closed by the flood even if it was finished. We drove across our bridge this morning and noticed that the handrails for the footpath hadn’t been taken down before the waters came down and now they are just a twisted mess. Something else for we taxpayers to pay for as a result of local council works incompetence.