The fifty year storm

Quite a drama unfolded last afternoon, and on into the night. I was doing art while a "fifty year storm" barreled in off the Southern Ocean, and Dave had been out for a bike ride before it hit. He was home about twenty minutes after the rain began. What we thought of as a torrential downpour was barely the beginning. About 3:45pm, the lights flickered, flickered again, and the power went off. Uh huh. Here we go (photos below are form the media: Bureau of Meteorology, ABC etc. Not my work, guys -- I was tucked up at home, warm and dry!) ...

The storm crossing Brighton Beach ... this was our local beach until just four years ago, when we moved...

...and a wing of the same storm looms over Woomera, faaaar away in the interior.

The big picture, as seen by the the Himawari weather satellite. It's being classified as a cyclone.

A cyclone??? Off the Southern Ocean??? This Does. Not. Happen. Except, apparently now it does. The way we don't get tornadoes here. Not ever. But one was caught on video by a farmer up at Blyth, which is too close to the Clare Valley for comfort. Stuff is happening that no one never saw before.

(Climate change? I know ... many people are in denial, and it's easy to say, "If we lived a thousand year lifespan we'd have seen it before, therefore it's normal." But it ain't so simple. We've been getting "the storm of the decade" every year, twice a year, for some time now. This one is being called the "fifty year" storm ... and soon such events will be commonplace. That is what's abnormal -- not a storm in itself. The frequency of them. Like it or not, things are changing.)

Boiled down to a tale fitting into a thimble, what happened is this:  severe weather (over 100,000 lightning strikes) caused the main power generators to "trip." They scrammed, it took many hours to get 'em back online. Twenty-two power transmission pylons were totaled; the whole state of South Australia blacked out  -- yep, there's hell to pay, that this can happen to so vast an area. The how and why, and what to do about it, will be beaten up for days. Hopefully, something will be done. Soon.

Next day, there's still thousands of homes without power, and the sting in the tail of the storm isn't yet spent . Our power came back on after about five hours in the dark -- we were lucky. Got the central heating on at once, because things got very cold. Today, rain continues to lash; thunder and hail are forecast for this afternoon. Dave and I will run errands in the lull, be back inside when the "fun" starts ... with a good supply of candles, flashlights, batteries and fully-charged mobile devices. Like last night, when he, I and Mike played candlelight poker.  

So let's get this uploaded before anything dramatic happens! This was yesterday's weather map, just as the storm came in:

Thank gods, today's map just looks like a lot of rain. Things are okay in Old Reynella ... and I'm glad to say that the backyard is sheltered enough for the purple flag iris not to have been destroyed. I was out there gardening, weeding, pruning, taking photos, in the gorgeously warm "calm before the storm" -- it was like a summer's morning, and I have the pictures to prove it.

A cyclone, in South Australia?