time
Storage? I am Storage!
I don't know how many here realize, but a fair percentage of my State (Queensland) is/was/will be under water. More than 20 people have died - not many compared to an earthquake, but a surprising number to drown in rising water. We have had the worst weather I can remember in my lifetime, even worse than what led to major flooding 36 years ago.
Roads are closed all over the State. This site gives you some idea of the scale, just keep scrolling.
The third 'regional' city, Toowoomba, just got hammered. Among the dead are a mother and son who perished when their car was washed away in the middle of the city! Only the father was rescued in time. Check out some of the photos.
The part that freaks me out is that Toowoomba is 691 meters above sea level - you have to climb over a mountain range to get there.
If Chewy still lives in the Gold Coast hinterland, he's probably not going anywhere right now.
I live in the capital, Brisbane. In December, the central weather station recorded rain for all but 9 of the 31 days in December. A further 3 days were only a couple of millimeters. That still means significant rain for 2 days out of every 3 for an entire month. It's now the 10th day in January and it has rained somewhere in Brisbane every single day so far - my nearest weather station has recorded 9 out of 10.
Brisbane doesn't normally get the huge falls of other parts of the State, but it is built around the banks of the Brisbane River. After the devastation of 1974, two inline dams were built with the dual role of water storage and flood mitigation. They've had to dump water for weeks now, picking up the pace to 170 gigaliters a day - that's comparable to Niagara Falls ...
The dumping adds to the level of the downstream waterways, including the Brisbane River, which leads to more flooding ...
The main dam has a target capacity of 1160 gigaliters, with the theoretical overload margin for flood mitigation at 225% of that. The thing is, it's already at 150%, and apparently the catchment added 1000 gigaliters in just one day (that's nearly twice the volume of water in Sydney Harbour BTW). So one more day of heavy rain could see it overflowing the slipway ...
That would all pump into the Brisbane River, which is already flowing about 4,000 m3/s (350 gigaliters a day).
Four years ago, I lived within 200 meters of the river; now I live near the top of a hill so I can sleep at night.
Roads are closed all over the State. This site gives you some idea of the scale, just keep scrolling.
The third 'regional' city, Toowoomba, just got hammered. Among the dead are a mother and son who perished when their car was washed away in the middle of the city! Only the father was rescued in time. Check out some of the photos.
The part that freaks me out is that Toowoomba is 691 meters above sea level - you have to climb over a mountain range to get there.
If Chewy still lives in the Gold Coast hinterland, he's probably not going anywhere right now.
I live in the capital, Brisbane. In December, the central weather station recorded rain for all but 9 of the 31 days in December. A further 3 days were only a couple of millimeters. That still means significant rain for 2 days out of every 3 for an entire month. It's now the 10th day in January and it has rained somewhere in Brisbane every single day so far - my nearest weather station has recorded 9 out of 10.
Brisbane doesn't normally get the huge falls of other parts of the State, but it is built around the banks of the Brisbane River. After the devastation of 1974, two inline dams were built with the dual role of water storage and flood mitigation. They've had to dump water for weeks now, picking up the pace to 170 gigaliters a day - that's comparable to Niagara Falls ...
The dumping adds to the level of the downstream waterways, including the Brisbane River, which leads to more flooding ...
The main dam has a target capacity of 1160 gigaliters, with the theoretical overload margin for flood mitigation at 225% of that. The thing is, it's already at 150%, and apparently the catchment added 1000 gigaliters in just one day (that's nearly twice the volume of water in Sydney Harbour BTW). So one more day of heavy rain could see it overflowing the slipway ...
That would all pump into the Brisbane River, which is already flowing about 4,000 m3/s (350 gigaliters a day).
Four years ago, I lived within 200 meters of the river; now I live near the top of a hill so I can sleep at night.
