Tuesday 10 February 2015

The Wet Season makes a splash

We've all been complaining about the dreadful heat and lack of rain, so when it started raining at the end of last week, we thought 'send 'er down, Huey'.

By Sunday morning, we were all a little less enthusiastic. So much rain had fallen* in the catchment of the North Johnstone River that the river broke its banks. It cut the Malanda Atherton Road at Malanda Falls and swamped houses and farmland in and around town.

I moved house in the last week of January. I said goodbye to Basil the brush turkey, the belligerent scrubwrens and gerygones, the mob of bush stone-curlews and the agile wallaby that had wandered into the garden one day and settled in, and I shifted to a place on the other side of town. On Sunday the creek, which forms one boundary of the old place, and the North Johnstone River, which runs along the back of the blocks on the other side, both flooded.

There are plenty of photos and videos of the floods, but my limited bandwidth and abysmally low 'broadband' speeds don't allow me to go looking for them. I'll nip into the library later this week and see if I can add some links then.

(We're expecting a bit more rain this weekend.)


* About 300 mm.