The whole of Australia's east coast has been on an extreme weather alert. Huge rainfalls in the hundreds of millimetres in just two days and a king tide at 8:30pm on Sunday which was the highest tide of the year, coincided with the largest-scale storms in recent decades.
After the Gold Coast and Brisbane and the Northern Rivers, it was Sydney's turn where residents were evacuated from Chipping Norton, Milperra, Woronora, Lansvale, and Picton due to flooding. In addition, a large numbers of main roads, including across Sydney's metropolitan area, were closed.
On Sydney's northern beaches, the erosion of Collaroy Beach - click also here - has been the worst since 1974, and residents were evacuated overnight after houses, a block of units, and the beach club at Collaroy were damaged by wild surf caused by the storm.
Then the severe weather moved to our South Coast and we spent an anxious night watching the tide at Batemans Bay Bridge, and again this morning when a 1.54m-tide at 9.24 am combined with the rainwater run-off from the mountains.
The rain has since eased although the run-off continues and the next test will be tonight's high tide (another king tide of 2.04m) at 9.35 pm.
In the meantime, I keep an eye on the all-important waterflow at the upstream pump station at Brooman which stood at 181,877 ML/day at a water level of 10.05m at 6 o'clock this morning but has since dropped which makes me think that we may have dodged the bullet.
Here are the subsequent Brooman readings:
|
|
(m) |
(ML/day) |
| 6am | 10.05 | 181,877 |
| 2pm | 8.90 | 128,163 |
| 3pm | 8.55 | 114,610 |
| 4pm | 8.18 | 101,406 |
| 5pm | 7.76 | 87,757 |
| 6pm | 7.30 | 74,705 |
| 7pm | 6.85 | 63,305 |
What may sound like a sigh of relief to you is the air escaping from my deflating water-wings as I pack them away for another day.
Five o'clock in the evening along the mighty Clyde River
"Dark blue is the river; Golden is the sand
It flows along forever; With trees on either hand..."
