Yikes! MAJOR Floods in Australia!

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Hello Summer!
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Yo, yo, Aussies! Your turn to check in with us! Are you high and dry or do you need some scuba gear? We here in CA might have some to spare.

Around 1,000 people in Queensland have been evacuated, including the entire population of the town of Theodore. The government has declared Theodore and two other towns in the region to be disaster zones, and forecasters say the floods have not yet peaked....The town's river has risen more than 50cm (20 in) above its previous recorded high, Emergency Management Queensland spokesman Bruce O'Grady told Australia's ABC News.

...Inland towns such as Chinchilla and Dalby are all under water; the nearby town of Warra, and the towns of Alpha and Jericho, west of Emerald, have also been declared disaster zones, with hundreds of homes flooded or at risk. Media reports said Dalby was running low on drinking water supplies after its water treatment plant was damaged by the floods. A further 200 homes were swamped in Bundaberg on the south-east coast and hundreds of roads in the region have been made impassable.

The state capital, Brisbane, has recorded its wettest December in more than 150 years. Cyclone Tasha, which hit Queensland on Saturday, also brought torrential rain to the state....Further south, in New South Wales, about 175 people who had spent the night in evacuation centres have returned home. But 800 people in the towns of Urbenville and Bonalbo are expected to be cut off for another 24 hours.

While the rain is now easing, water is continuing to flow from sodden land across central and southern Queensland into already swollen rivers, adds our correspondent.
More here.

:eek: Whoa. This is bad. Those of you down-under, please do check in with us.
 
Basically an area of Western Queensland and Northern New South Wales about twice the size of Texas either has been, is, or will be flooded within the last month and on into next year. Fortunately there are very few people living out there in what is essentially (normally) semi desert and desert.

The land is very flat and water consequently only drains away very slowly so some places down stream know that the floods will arrive in perhaps two or three weeks time even if they haven't had any rain downstream!

The wet weather is due to La Nina weather patterns breaking what has been a nine year drought in OZ, La Nina affects California similarly but between December and March we also get tropical monsoon conditions in Northern Australia. The Monsoon 'belt' has moved to the south this year bringing with it the usual cyclones (hurricanes).

95% of Australia's population lives within 30 miles of the coast and is not much affected by these floods except for the city of Bundaberg on the central Queensland coast.
 
Basically an area of Western Queensland and Northern New South Wales about twice the size of Texas either has been, is, or will be flooded within the last month and on into next year. Fortunately there are very few people living out there in what is essentially (normally) semi desert and desert.

The land is very flat and water consequently o-
95% of Australia's population lives within 30 miles of the coast and is not much affected by these floods except for the city of Bundaberg on the central Queensland coast.

But, but what about the sheep?
 
Basically an area of Western Queensland and Northern New South Wales about twice the size of Texas either has been, is, or will be flooded within the last month and on into next year. Fortunately there are very few people living out there in what is essentially (normally) semi desert and desert.
So only the koalas and kangaroos are in need of scuba gear?
 
Things got worse today, 12 drowned so far, 78 missing, grave fears held for 30.

The rain which was previously west of the dividing range has now moved to the East threatening major population centres on the coast. Brisbane expects floods by Thursday to inundate between 7,000 and 9,000 homes.

One weather station reported 5 inches of rain in 20 minutes last night and another recorded 15 inches in 4 hours.

Emergency Services (mainly volunteers) very well organised and doing a terrific job so far, but are very stretched.

About 60% of Queensland and 15% of Northern NSW (roughly equivalent to western Europe) is a disaster area.

Every politician worth her or his salt is jumping in front of a camera to take credit, so we should be ok.
 

BRISBANE, Australia — Greg Kowald was driving through the center of Toowoomba when a terrifying, tsunami-like wall of water roared through the streets of the northeast Australian city.

Office windows exploded, cars careened into trees and bobbed in the churning brown water like corks. The deluge washed away bridges and sidewalks; people desperately clung to power poles to survive. Before it was over, the flash flood left at least 10 dead and 78 missing.

"The water was literally leaping, six or 10 feet into the air, through creeks and over bridges and into parks," Kowald, a 53-year-old musician, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "There was nowhere to escape, even if there had been warnings. There was just a sea of water about a kilometer (half a mile) wide."

Holy flat lands Batman!
 
Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUpkPTcqPY :eek:

Remember that part of the bible where it says that rainbows were a promise from God that he would never flood the earth again? He must rolling around on his cloud right now laughing "I can't believe those suckers fell for it!"
 
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No. It's the wet season, but much wetter than usual.

The water reaching Brisbane may coincide with an unusually high tide. That is real trouble.

Og

Holland figured out a way to deal with their unusually high tides centuries ago. Guess the Ozites were too busy at their beaches and barbies to do the same. ;)
 
Holland figured out a way to deal with their unusually high tides centuries ago. Guess the Ozites were too busy at their beaches and barbies to do the same. ;)

Holland doesn't have tropical storms. If it did, their country would be underwater every wet season. As it is, the area of Australia that is flooded is larger than half a dozen Hollands.

The floods in Brisbane appear to have peaked a metre BELOW the 1974 level but elsewhere in Queensland this is already a one-in-a-hundred-year event with more storm rains to come.

Og
 
In case anyone is wondering, Queensland is considerably larger than Texas. That's a lot of water. . .
 

Damn snakes are apparently everywhere. Some guy actually found 1000 snakes, mostly green tree and browns, in his house fleeing from the water. I think I saw a red belly black snake in the pile too. I want to know where we signed on to have so many fucking deadly snakes? First thing, being a country girl, I was taught was how to avoid getting bitten. The guy who mows our lawn has to be wary when he's whipper snipping the edges. Fuck me. Can't you poms take a couple of the less nasty ones? I'll trade you death adders for hedgehogs? The echidnas have been looking snooty. They could do with some competition.
 
Damn snakes are apparently everywhere. Some guy actually found 1000 snakes, mostly green tree and browns, in his house fleeing from the water. I think I saw a red belly black snake in the pile too. I want to know where we signed on to have so many fucking deadly snakes? First thing, being a country girl, I was taught was how to avoid getting bitten. The guy who mows our lawn has to be wary when he's whipper snipping the edges. Fuck me. Can't you poms take a couple of the less nasty ones? I'll trade you death adders for hedgehogs? The echidnas have been looking snooty. They could do with some competition.

Holy snake bite Vee! you keep your eye out for those slippery devils.

I'm happy with the rattlesnakes, we have up here, thank you kindly. At least they had the common decency to warn you.

I hope you are dry. It's been wet here in LaLa land and rain is coming. We've had a few year drought up here too and this year we may break it.
:rose::rose:
 
Holy snake bite Vee! you keep your eye out for those slippery devils.

I'm happy with the rattlesnakes, we have up here, thank you kindly. At least they had the common decency to warn you.

I hope you are dry. It's been wet here in LaLa land and rain is coming. We've had a few year drought up here too and this year we may break it.
:rose::rose:

Thats what we were saying before in went torrential here. Fricken snakes are everywhere. I had an uncle who got bitten five times by the same kind of snake. And if it ain't the snakes, the spiders will have ya. Redbacks (a relation of black widows) actually enjoy lurking around houses. Funnel webs look like tiny tarantulas but are actually deadly poison to humans though the venom is only really toxic to primates which makes me wonder what mother nature was thinking given humans are the only primates in Aussie.
 

It was a horrific scene that quickly spiraled out of control: A flash flood in Australia's Queensland — in Toowoomba, to be exact — that caught most residents by surprise. As the waters rose, as panic set in, one 13-year-old sacrificed himself to save the brother he loved. By the next morning, he was being a hailed a hero.

There is a story for a different venue, but worth telling.
 
Thats what we were saying before in went torrential here. Fricken snakes are everywhere. I had an uncle who got bitten five times by the same kind of snake. And if it ain't the snakes, the spiders will have ya. Redbacks (a relation of black widows) actually enjoy lurking around houses. Funnel webs look like tiny tarantulas but are actually deadly poison to humans though the venom is only really toxic to primates which makes me wonder what mother nature was thinking given humans are the only primates in Aussie.

We have black widows by the metric ton in southern California. I really hate how people always say how harmless they are. I've been bitten by one and I'll tell you right now, they're anything but harmless.
 
We have black widows by the metric ton in southern California. I really hate how people always say how harmless they are. I've been bitten by one and I'll tell you right now, they're anything but harmless.

Redbacks are more dangerous than black widows and my mother is unfortunate enough to be allergic to em as well. She's been bitten twice, both times on the arse because they like to hang around under the seats of old fashioned pit toilets. The was this old comedy song called Redback on the Toilet Seat and my old man used to piss mum off by playing it regularly. She has no sense of humour about it....
 
Redbacks are more dangerous than black widows and my mother is unfortunate enough to be allergic to em as well. She's been bitten twice, both times on the arse because they like to hang around under the seats of old fashioned pit toilets. The was this old comedy song called Redback on the Toilet Seat and my old man used to piss mum off by playing it regularly. She has no sense of humour about it....

I hear black widows do the same trick of hiding in outhouses under the seat. All the supposed rules about where black widows are supposed to be didn't really help me though when I got bit. She was in a really well-lit part of the yard, not in her web, and I wasn't bothering her. For some reason she was just out wandering around on the grass.
 
I'm happy with the rattlesnakes, we have up here, thank you kindly. At least they had the common decency to warn you.
I heard somewhere (can't verify if it's true) that rattlers with rattles warning away folk have caused so many people to get out the shovel and kill 'em that evolution has stepped in.

As mutant ones without rattles haven't been discovered and killed by people--and so have been able to breed and pass on this mutation (survival of the fittest there!) the rattlesnake population has, apparently, begun to be rattle free.
 
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