Cleaning up flood damage ... while the sun shines

The day after the high winds and torrential rains Dave and I went south along the coast to check out conditions as the bad weather blew over.

One day after, the rivers were still right up to the roads in many cases. The "water over road" signs were still out, and you saw the lakes of mud where cascades had streamed across, but mostly -- mostly -- folks are down to a clean-up job, while emergency services work on removing broken trees. The good thing is, the community has come out in force, in the hardest-hit areas, to help people who've been underwater. One can only imagine what it must be like to be very old, or sick, or both, and have cold, mucky water rising around your knees and ruining everything you possess. The thought makes you shudder.

But in those hardest-hit areas, it'll to take a lot longer to fix the damage. I've borrowed this image from the ABC news website ...

Full credit to ABC News -- their copyright etc. 

...that is, or rather was, Montacute road. The floods must have washed out the foundations and the road collapsed. This one will take months to fix. If you'd like to read the whole story online, you'll find it here ... and one of their pictures was also on the front page of the state's newspaper:

Normally, Koalas don't pay much attention to rain. They live in the tops of trees and just dig in with their three-inch claws and go right back to sleep. But when the trees are really thrashing, they'll probably have to come down -- or perhaps this little guy was in a tree that actually fell. Either way, he found himself swimming for it, and taking refuge on a fence post; a very bedraggled little thing indeed.

(One hopes Fauna Rescue managed to get him to high ground, make sure he's okay. What makes koalas' lives doubly hard is that in a matter of weeks our temperatures will be so high, the forest so dry, their problems are all about thirst and bushfires; and koalas aren't as highly mobile as kangaroos, who can just get up and go when they must. Still, koalas are more agile, and much faster, than you'd guess. We've seen them on the ground and bounding along. They also have no road sense, and in fact many country roads have "look out for koalas" signs. It's quite an experience when one strolls out in the road right in front of you, in the dead of night. Good job on the brakes, Dave!)

Credits to the ABC photographers for this shot, and the image of Montacute Road ... or rather, the yawning pit where Montacute Road ought to be! See the link above.

Further south and  on the coast, the damage was more about erosion -- dunes have been cut away. It takes years to build up a good, strong system of dunes to reclaim and stabilize some coastline. One of these "super storms," as they're calling it, can undo the work of decades. One wants to say, "Well, the dunes will build back up, as they did the first time." Left alone, yes, they would. But these "storm of the decade" events are coming through every year now, and sometimes two or three times per year. The old "storm of the decade" is now commonplace; which bodes ill for the dunes. Sigh.

Here we are, finding the Okaparinga River returned to its channel today, leaving the surrounds a quagmire...

Home -- looks like it's been snowing. Hail, like the last such pics I posed? Nope. Blossom. The trees are stripped.

We were lucky. We suffered no damage whatever, and the worst we can complain of is that the wild winds stripped the trees of spring blossom. It was only September 2, fourteen days ago, when I posted this. All gone now. Well ... botheration. But yes, we were lucky -- and grateful for it...

And then the sun shone, the clouds vamoosed over the horizon, and now it's warm and bright. Dang.

First things first...

Lola and the Millennium Possum. And -- snow?!

Snow? In South Australia? Well, okay ... not actually snow. In fact, we had one of the biggest thunderstorms of recent years, got dumped on with ice -- and the July day was cold enough for the hail to "lay," or "stick" for almost an hour. Here's the view from the front door, across the corner of the garden, to where Dave's van and Jen's car are apparently sitting in a layer of snow, with a snowy street right behind them! What's so weird about this is that four days before we were out for a hike along the banks of the Onkaparinga River in this kind of weather:

Onkaparinga River, July 7th -- four days ago...

Well, the fair city of Adelaide, South Australia, is renowned for offering all four seasons in a single day. Even so, hail so think it looks like snow in the suburbs is unusual enough to blog about. In fact, it did actually snow on Mount Lofty today, which is so unusual, it was featured on the News on TV. 

All of which seems like a good place to start a personal blog. 

"First things first..." -- I guess this blog is mostly for me; a way of charting my path through a difficult "today" and into a "tomorrow" I hope to find, or build, or orchestrate. Three clichés that got to be clichés by being absolutely correct: nothing is ever easy ... good things are always worked hard for ... the best things are a) worth waiting for and, b) usually saved till last. So I'll start somewhere and keep moving forward; and this blog will at least help me chart where I've been, if not where I'm going.

Zolie in the plum tree -- in better weather

Mark the date of starting: Tuesday, July 12, on a stormy evening with Mom just home out of the hospital (still suffering pneumonia), Zolie still freaked out after the thunder and parked on Dave's lap as he reads up on the Tour de France and looks forward to tonight's stage (which is leaving Spain and heading back into France), Mike just putting finishing touches to another short story, and a laptop called Pandora that seems to be having a hernia.

Good place to begin!