A short-lived flood here

The rain in this area (by which I mean within 20km of our house) has not been any where near as bad as reported by Denis from Robertson.  It was raining when we drove from Mallacoota but basically a quite gentle fall.  However shortly after we got back Denis enquired what was going on at Captains Flat as the radar based near there was showing a huge spinning yellow mass (ie very heavy rain).

The next morning there was a band of rain going diagonally across the Tablelands but keeping about 15km East of us.  As a result of this I wasn't surprised to find, when I went out to take Tammy to the vet (annual shots, no drama) that Briars Sharrow Rd was cut by the Molonglo (which has its source upstream from The Flat.  I tried to take a photo on my phone but the light was too poor.

So today I went back .  The road was open but the water was not far below the crossing:
When the water was over the crossing on Tuesday these trees were in the middle of the road!   Well done Palerang Shire for cleaning them up.
Elsewhere in the general area things are a tad diabolical.  The Kings Hwy has been shut 3 days a week for some time to allow an area prone to landslides to be stabilised.  I think that finished last week.  Whatever: there was a slide in that vicinity yesterday so the road is now closed for 36 hours to clean that up.
In the past the diversion has been by Nerriga and Braidwood, adding about 2 hours to the trip from Canberra to Batemans Bay.  As the options now are to go via

  • Picton Rd (because Nerriga Rd is flooded and Macquarie Pass dodgy) which adds about 300 km and at least 3.5 hours or 
  • Cooma and Bega (praying that Brown Mountain stays open) which adds about 200 km and 2.5 hours.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more