Sunday at 5 o'clock

Sunday at 5 o'clock we ventured out to look at the backyard. It has been raining heavily all day and most of yesterday. Some would say this weather sucks, but Michael and I remember rain falling like this in Marysville, routinely, with an average annual rainfall of over 1000ml, most of it in the winter months where it rained every day (like England).

However today was different (for here), today it has rained since about 10pm last night and has barely let up. We went out to do the shopping at 10:00am, returning home at noon, and since then it has rained so constantly that we have just lived in it, around it, through it.

The water table has not had time to adjust to all this rain, as it has been on and off like this for the last 3 weeks. There is no drying out period, no wind, and the last time we saw the sun it was Monday last week. Therefore every shower adds -what it feels like - a million millimetres to the already saturated land.

We were quite excited to get out and see how the water transforms the property, though apparently there are people in WA who have been sitting on their house roofs for 16 hours waiting for help from a helicopter.

The water is around the house and has broken free from the dam and is running every which way into the spillway. It courses across the paddock and makes creeks where there were none. Most noteable is a dam of laying water, which has sprung up in a dip of the paddock. I started to wade into it, but only ventured about 5 m out, the bottom was muddy and I was not sure how deep it would get. One of the picture here is of a spider running up a piece of grass to escape the flood.

The pictures below show just a little of the flood on our land, and the movie at the bottom is the footage of the creek causeway that has cut us off from the world. Even Michael's new car will not tackle its fast running current.

We know that there are a lot of people affected by this way worse than us, but we have never seen anything like this before in our own backyard. We are in awe.

Flood and the last wedding of the year

Yesterday we worked the last wedding of the year. It was bit of a relief because I haven't been working on many weddings in the last 6 months, as my job doing both weddings and conferencing got too busy and we split the role between my assistant and I. However Erin left the job 2 weeks after I got back from France, which left me with three weddings to finish off for the year.

Each of the last 3 weddings have been totally bizarre, the first drank everything we had in our fridges and more and some how burnt tablecloths and had a food fight. The second was a couple I'd never met, as they had done all of their booking from overseas and arrived on the afternoon of the big day - we had to guess at colours and decor to suit their dresses. The third one last night should have been the most normal. After all, I'd dealt with them orginally last year when they booked and not much had changed since in terms of details.

Its all very well and good to assume, but you cant factor in the weather. It has rained in in QLD for the last week, and while some of the days have not had such heavy falls, there are a couple of days when it has just poured down for the whole day without any break. Out west and on the coast there are a lot of places either on flood alert or actually in flood. Here, while it has been really soggy and muddy and inconvenient to our activities schedule, we have not really seen the water get too high.

However yesterday was one of the major days of rain. As you can imagine, with a wedding this means a long day of traipsing through the wet and mud up and down the hill to our function room. Despite everything with the weather, the wedding went off ok and we got the 100 guests settled into the reception. I was so busy thinking about the wedding and ferrying guests around with umbrellas that I had not really taken any notice of how much rain we'd had besides the fact that it just wouldn't stop.

I mentioned to Michael about 8:00pm that I did not feel ok driving home alone as I was worried our creek might be up, and he has the fancy new 4WD, which remains relatively untested. We set off home at 9:o0pm and when we reached the creek we were very excited. In the dark the water seemed to rage across the road. We got across there ok and drove up to the dam and ford to see how much the overflow was running. The dam is fed by Western Creek, which runs throught the whole farm and down into Grandchester. It takes a couple of days to reach us, being fed by the run off from the hills through the property and then the dam, which is as big as a football field needs to fill up before it floods and spills down to continue the flow of the creek.

The dam over flow and ford were roaring water falls, we could hear it before we reached it. Its a bit hard to get pictures in the dark, so I went back this morning to get some more shots.

The ford just beyond our house that deals with the overflow of the dam. I used to think it was greedy that our dam caught all of the water of the creek and deprived people down stream, but today, looking at the water, I realised that it saves alot of flooding further downstream. Most of the area around the house has had extensive earthworks to create channels for the creek and overflow, before it hits the farms down stream. At least this way the creek causeway will never really get much higher than it is, the dam moderating the flood somewhat. The orginal property never having a dam, the creek would have just flowed through and across the paddocks and in flood would have probably even come up to the house.

The overflow runs parallel to the house and down to the creek that we cross to get to our front gate.

The overflow and ford are usually bone dry and rarely run, even after several days of rain.

The dam, the source of all this water (well the catchment really) and the overflowing section near the back. Looks fairly tranquil from this angle.

The creek causeway we have to cross to get to our house, usually dry. Not a huge flood in these pictures, the water was on its way up, but judging by the mud levels had been up and down all day.

The creek causeway again in day light, with a clear view of how high the water came up during the night.

Still looks a bit dodgy and my car would probably be sad if I tried to cross it.