The Deluge

Apart from me having contracted Eloise's vomiting virus and having spent three days in bed after a night of relentless chundering, the main news this week is.... the flood.

It started raining on Tuesday afternoon properly. It rained all night. In the morning it was raining hgard enough for us to give Nicole a lift into work for her early shift.

Then a little later - still raining - I dropped Eloise off at nursery and drove into college. The plan was to pick up Nicole on the way back out, then we were going to on open day at a school near the hospital.

Hardly anyone turned up to college. Which was great actually as it was colour darkroom day which involved a lot of wandering around in utter darkness and contending for expert time for advice on colour balancing and filtration, which can be quite frustrating with ten people. But with only five people it was a breeze and we all got a lot done.

I got a call from Nicole about two o'clock to say that the open day was cancelled and that Enoggera creek had burst its banks, submerging good portions of Newmarket. Nicole's boss had gone to check on his car and found that only the roof was not submerged.

When I got in the car to go and pick up the girls it transpired that the main road which runs out past the hospital was underwater, and to be avoided at all costs. So the dog-leg around town brought me around the other side, and it took me an hour and a half to get the two crow's kilometres from town to hospital.

When we got home we took a walk up to see the brook and saw it swelled as never before you can see from the photo above that the normally narrow and genteel water course was now deep, wide and fast with massive amounts of water flowing down it.

Some radio stats:
In twenty-four hours, 400mm of rain fell.
In twenty-four hours, six months' worth of rain fell.
The flooding is the worst since the Great Flood of 1974.
The combined dam levels have increased by nearly 10%.
The drought is over.

and

Water restrictions remain in place.