We have gone from a drought country to a flooded country, nothing really new from our history of the nation.
The Major Flood areas are in Queensland and northern New South Wales. Qld is 1500-3,000 kms away, and Northern NSW is 1200 kms away
The area under flood is equivalent to ALL of Germany and France combined.
One town almost had what looked like an inland Tsunami going through it, at the end the town looked like a tornado had ripped it apart.
Two days ago they had the major flood surge through Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, with the river rising 4.5m – so downtown, water everywhere, and around 12,000 houses flooded in the city suburb areas there too, and 2,500 business under water, and another of the same amount partially flooded.
In Ipswich, a major country town of 155,000 further north, they had a river flood peak at 19m !! Those on higher grounds OK, those that built in the valley, not so good.
Most of this area flooded throughout Qld and NSW is farm lands, however over 27 major country towns are flooded, or evacuated. All this is causing many councils to now start rethinking about allowing buildings on flood or low levels plants. But of course people like to build by the rivers for the scenic views and think the 100 year floods are not going to be in their lifetime.
They are expecting the weather to dry out a little and they need 3-7 days for the water to dissipate to normal very high flood levels in all the river systems. And to think Qld has not had it normal monsoon time yet.
I was going to add some pictures here, but am adding this link. Just giving here a link of one of the many blogs Note that the person wrote this on the 7th January, 4 days Later, Lots of rain later, even Brisbane is now flooded.
http://diane-adventurebeforedementia.blogspot.com/2011/01/queenslands-floods.html
In Victoria we are having a good wet summer, really nice for all the plants after 13 years of drought. Some of the Victorian northern country areas have had some floods through them as we are getting some of the tropical clouds that normally stay in the north being pulled down the cooler Victoria state.. (last night it was still 24 deg at midnight) Even here we are seeing some areas of northern Victoria have had their monthly averages in one day. They are still talking though that Victoria looks like getting some sporadic heavy rainfalls coming from these major shift weather patterns, and so we will also continue to see more flooding in our state in various low lying areas. So we start off with an interesting year.
What was not very nice, some of the people that lost their houses in the bushfires last year, ended up have their new houses inundated from these floods.
Perth in Western Australia , over 1,500 miles to the west of us, on the other hand is now going through a major drought ( yes the weather pattern has changed at the moment) Had huge bushfires there while the floods were in Qld.Took this photo 2 days ago in our gardens.
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