All the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened

"...all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened"
Genesis 7:11/


Now, I'm one of the least religious people ever. But in this case its very fitting!
Remember how it hasn't rained in the Pilbara? Well, it did.
We've still not had much rain, but its been falling further down the catchments in Newman/Jigalong. 


So I innocently went for a drive on friday, joking about how there had better not be any water in some of the more awkward river crossings further down (think steep bumpy washed out drop down into a soft river base with standing water and keeping enough momentum to get you across the next 50m of river gravel...)


How shocked was I to encounter this at the first hurdle?!

Thats the "road" across the Oakover. Its normally a 300, wide gravel and rock crossing, with a couple of standing water pools. Its not normally a 300m wide fast flowing body of water.

My new fieldy was in front, and I saw him starting to out the car into low range to attempt a crossing. Not Good! So I ran up and stopped him, we radioed back to base to see if there had been any reports of flooding the previous day. Nope. It was all new. Flash flood! 

I stood around taking pretty pictures, and as I spun around taking this panorama:

I saw the river rising BEHIND where we had stopped the cars.

Very quick 3 point turn on the little island we were up on and we got the hell out of there. It would have been an interesting incident report! How did you lose these two utes? Well... 

Thats the video of the water rising over the track. We were parked up on the dry bit on the other side...

 I've seen this river in flood before, but I've never seen it actually in the act of flooding before. It was impressive!

Back on site, we warned the road trains, who carry our ore to port, that they should put word out to be cautious of the oakover crossing 50km up the sealed road, because the flood wave is on its way.

We told people at site, and they didn't understand what we were talking about, because the road trains could still get through. Yes, um, because they have a raised sealed road 50km away from where the current flooding is going on, we have a dodgy gravel track that bumps its way along the base of the river channels...

When the flood wave did hit the monitored river crossing 50km away, it rose 2m in half an hour:

Thats how we got 3 road trains washed away a few years ago. One truck crossed OK, so the guy coming in the other direction crossed, but in the 10 minutes between them  the river had risen so dramatically that it washed the truck away. Another 2 went the same way because it was night time and they couldn't see the extent of the water. They ended up doing an air rescue, using a mustering helicopter from one of the stations, and a jet ski, and the driver we taken to hospital with hyperthermia. 

Oh, and the flood also buried on of our contractors pumps that theyd left in the river chained to a tree. Oops.

Perth Storms

On Monday, our drought broke in epic style.

Its been over four months since we had any real rain. Officially 0.2mm in February, and the odd very light unregistered shower, but basically nothing.
That all changed big style!

I was up at work, due to fly back. We saw that there was rain forecast but that was all. I fell asleep on the plane back, to be rudely awoken by some big bumps. Opened the window to see grey. Just grey. And lightening flashes. After the scary landing, and spending the whole time thinking "thank God I'm not in a Brasilia" (the 30 seater planes we used to use) we got to the terminal and heard the radio reports coming in of absolute chaos. And we'd just landed right in the middle of it.

We got 42mm of rain in a couple of hours. 150,000 properties were reportedly left without power. About 100 sets of traffic lights went out. Part of the cliff near Kings Park collapsed and sent a landslide ripping through houses at the base of the mount.

We got off quite lightly. A few small branches off the tree and a few ceiling leaks. And a scary hour landing and driving home through the rain and lack of traffic lights.

There was a very pretty sunset though, once the sun ducked under the storm clouds.

Always a silver lining.

Rain drops keep falling on my head... Or not.

OK, so the rain I asked for has come, accompanied by some awesome lightning and massive winds.

I have a love/hate relationship with lightning. While I still enjoy watching it (from a safe distance), I have had a few too many close calls while wild camping in the Swiss Alps to really enjoy being out in it. For example, being at 3000m and 3 hours hike away from camp watching the lightning strike in the valley below me. Or lying awake in the dark for hours, having been woken up by the ground shaking due to the strikes, too scared to death to even turn the torch on in case it attracts the storms attention. So thats why I'm hiding inside.

Anyway, it got me thinking about rainfall in general and Australia being the desert continent that it is...

Perth is suffering pretty badly at the moment. The total rainfall since my birthday back in November is, wait for it, 0.2mm, on the 7th February. Seriously. I can't even see that small. There has been the odd shower in and around Perth, and I assume that this is one of them that happened to pass over the recording station.

The population of Perth is increasing massively and rapidly. We're at 1.65 million up from 1.34 million in 2001. 300,000 extra people in less than a decade. Thats 3 times the number of people who live in the town I come from at home arriving in quick succession. And I'm one of them.

And we're putting a massive strain on the resources.

The water corperation want us to save 6 buckets of water a day. I try to. Really I do, but having been brought up with generally more water than we can deal with (all though I do remember one summer with standpipes and trucked in bottled water for school) you tend not to think about it. Though I have started trying to shorten my showers and turn the water off when I shave my legs. I can do it out bush, when we only have 700 litres to last 6 of us a week. But its never enough to actually get clean, especially from the state we're usually in. Its more psychological clean in that case!

And our lawn sprinklers never seem to come on either, so we're saving water there! Though we don't have much of a lawn left...

What really annoys me is when the council owned areas are wasting huge amounts of water, sprinkling the roads and paths. And all over the cyclists in the case of Perth foreshore. At least 2 days a week there is a bottle neck near the Causeway, as people on bikes and foot and going both directions weave around the puddles and the jets of water. But we're the ones who have to save our 6 buckets?!

People laughed at the idea of a canal from the Kimberly, but seriously, if O'Connor could build the pipeline from Perth to Kalgoorlie over 100 years ago, surely we can do better. After all, its down hill from up there :)

Oh, and while we have the tropical thunderstorms, Al is fell running in the snow.

Read about it here