Australian Floods
 

Any of our friends down under being affected by these? I wish you luck and hope.

I saw on the news this morning that a chunk of Oz bigger than France and Germany combined is now under water. We've had our share of rain here in California lately, enough to overflow all our reservoirs and stave off the next drought, but that is some biblical shit right there going on down under. I hope all are staying high and dry. Or at least dry.

I join Paul in his wishes. I'm sure that fraternity will be as much a reality there as it was in my place a few months ago.

Hang in down there guys. Saw it on the news myself - crazy weather. And at the same time we'd tens of thousnds of people with no water at all here in Belfast, some of them for up to two weeks, due to burst and frozen pipes.

best of luck!! may you and yours stay safe!

Good luck
 

to my Australian friends.

Good luck from me also. And to our thirsty Irish brethren.

There are currently floods on opposite sides of the Australian continent, although both areas are in the northern (tropical) areas. The floods in the north of my state, Western Australia, are mostly in a region which is very sparsely populated. Bear in mind Australia only has around 21 million people but we live on an entire continent. Population densities over most of the continent are very low. The floods in the NE of the continent are more serious because they cover a wider area and there are more people living in the area affected.

The truth of it is that Australia is a land of extremes. An area will go for 10 or 15 years without rain and then when the rain comes it just won't stop and you get floods. I'm not sure if you guys in the northern hemisphere are seeing any news footage of the floods but if you are you will see that many of the houses in the flooded parts of Queensland are built on stilts. Tropical cyclones and floods are a part of life in that area of the country.

As others have said, I hope all our Australian friends are doing OK...

Targan, I haven't seen any TV news today, but for the last couple of days the Australian floods have been either first or second item, at least on Sky News...

And to the everlasting shame of US news...the lead story today is the Brett Favre and the NY Jets are being sued because Favre sent racy text messages to a Jets employee.

This must be why I watch BBC America for my news fix.

I just heard on the news that the flooded areas are suffering from an influx of snakes and crocodiles...yikes!

To add more to what Targan has said, the floods rate as news here obviously but they don't have the fear factor ramped up on them because they are a semi-regular occurrence - it's just that they occur once every 20 years (give or take 5 years) or in some cases every 50 years (give or take 10 years).
People who've lived in those regions for 40+ years tend to refer to these events as 20 year or 50 year floods (for obvious reasons).

It's a cycle that's been going on for literally forever but it gets very dramatic here because some people seem to think that if a flood is only likely to occur once in twenty years then it's not going to happen. These are the same people you see on the news screaming for government assistance and generally making out the story to be far worse than it is when the flood actually occurs.

The moral of the story is: -
Don't build your home on a floodplain, no matter how cheap the land - unless you build it on stilts.

Oh yeah, the crocs love it when the floods come! All the young males head out to look for new territories of their own. They can travel really long distances in the water. There are confirmed stories of crocs having swum as far as various pacific islands a long way off the Australian coast.

Snakes, meh. Snakes are a part of life here. There are snakes capable of killing you in lots of suburban back yards all over Australia. Most aren't aggressive.

Very true. Still, the flood levels are so high in some parts of Queensland that even the houses on stilts are facing inundation. Farming on a floodplain might be very productive but you should build your dwelling on the highest point of land possible in a flood prone area.

Hmmm, must be intresting to step out the front door to walk the door and find a couple of crocs eying the house!

I kid you not, I used to live in a place where if you went swimming it would be a race between the sharks and the crocs over which would get to eat you first.

Oh great and Sharks too... Wow...

Hmmmm, note to self, on any future visit Down Under, be sure to pack something in a 5MW plasma cannon...

;)

It looks like the sharks are winning this race!! :D

http://news.yahoo.com/video/odd-1574...video=23739572

Enjoy the link

Mike

Nah...don't need anything that exotic!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/54...5_gun#Variants

That should keep Mr. Shark honest! :p

Mike

gee like those crazy people that built a major city below sea level right next to the gulf of mexico and then insist on spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to figure out why it keeps flooding ever time someone sneezes in that direction.

(yeah im never moving to new orleans)

This might seem crazy to you but I doubt that this opinion would be shared by someone from Netherlands. Of course, these people know how to design a levee and unless proved otherwise don't neglect them.

yeah but in the Netherlands they'd only spend a few thousand on the inquiries. and the focus would be what idiot failed to maintain the damn dam. :rolleyes:

and though its been a minute since i've seen any photography of the region(since i can't get that NATO slot) it seems there enough redundancy in their flood control measures to not require nearly as much of a relief effort.

Swimming in crocodile infested waters isn't all that dangerous actually, provided you have a dog...
Toss the dog in first. If it survives the first minute, there's no crocs about (salties apparently prefer dog over human).

For the first 21 years of my life I lived in a town where it flooded annually. Fortunately the flood levees kept the worst of it out, but local rain still caused some issues within the levees. I went back in March 2010 for a few days and was completely flabbergasted to see buildings constructed in a MAJOR floodway. I've seen logs a metre or more in diameter sweeping through and just can't understand the logic behind spending a million dollars plus (per building) to develop such a risky location. :confused:

Although the floods up north are covering a large area, locations which haven't even seen rain in years, hundreds of kilometers away are being effected. With road and rail links cut, even washed away, supplies haven't been able to get through.

One of the big problems, which has barely been touched upon in the media over here, is disease and parasites. With all the stagnant water laying about, and the heat of an Australian summer, it's likely to be a bacterial and mosquito heaven in short order...

I can't say for the logic but their answer might be the same than the one which was given to us in Draguignan a few month ago: "what happened is beyond imagination and there were no ways to see it coming".

Of course, take me for a fool on top of that.:rolleyes:

In the case of Draguignan and the flooded areas next to my place the facts were:
- The flooded areas had seen worse floods sometimes in the past. Of course, such major flood occur about once every century (the last recorded one had occured a century before). Ooops!!
- The flooded area had plenty of housing. No more than thirty years ago it was farmland. The few housing made there had their living quarters on the top floor. Wander why?
- Freelee available on internet (state run websites) I had access to the various risk evaluations established in 2005 (the flood occured in 2010). They exactly described what finally happened (but obviously nobody could imagine such an important flood). For my part, I now doubt that our politicians know how to read.
- The best is to come. In order to prevent the various risks in Draguignan, the authorities had built a coordination center fully equipped to help the relief efforts... in the middle of the floodable area.:D That center was flooded early with 2 meters of water and the officer in charge of the relief effort along with the city mayor almost died in this.

- We keep voting for them.:p;)

Just one last add about Draguignan. Here is the map showing the risk and established in 2005.

To help:
The red line reprensent the maximum recorded flood
Maison d'arrêt = jail
Maison de retraîte = retirement home
Sécurité Civile = relief coordination center.

When the flood occured in 2010, the "sécurité civile" center had been expended to include the main fire station and the firemen HQ. Of course, we, the French, are the brightest and most inteligent people on the planet (Obvious, :eek:)

Its common for surfers to take there dogs surfing with them, and camp on the beach. Rule #1 is never let your dog sleep on your wetsuit.

I'm in South Australia. No floods where i am. Just a big dry.

LOL! I'm the guy, who when stationed in Alaska, kept hammering my CO to issue rounds for the 106mm recoilless rifle....just in case of Grizzily attack! Overkill...it really is the only way to go!

If you guys thought sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads was scary...

http://s-ak.buzzfed.com/static/image...68712752-0.jpg

Tony

Tony,

That picture is just SOOooo wrong.....

Can't help looking......

If I see one of these things, I am calling in the BIG GUNS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16%22/5...ber_Mark_7_gun

ROF, LMAO

Mike

Stats?? :D

Actually, New Orleans is built well inland, but the oil & gas industry has been busy chopping canels in the wetlands south of the city, and then the Army Corps of Engineers in its on-going war on the Mississippi River, severely restricted the flow of silt down into the Mouth of the Mississippi River (the mouth has actually moved well north of were it was in the 19th Century due to the lack of silt) that were the prime factors in the flooding...inadequate and out-dated pumps...certain home-owners associations that sued and won the last time that the Corps of Engineers tried to widen and heighten the levees in the area also played major roles in what happened. Not to mention the sheer stupidity of people building their homes and business at the foot of the levees, when simply walking to the top of the levee (all of 10 minutes) would have showed that the water was within a couple of feet of the top in clear weather, let alone when ole hurricane starts to blow!

Living right across the state line from New Orleans, I got to see ground zero of Katrina up front and personal...to add insult to injury, the Mississippi Gulf Coast got hit worse than New Orleans, had a sizable precentage of its federal aid redirected to New Orleans, and rebuilt faster than New Orleans. Even today, almost 5 years afterwards, there are portions of New Orleans that still have debris piles from Katrina....it does make one wonder just were all of that federal aid went....

Can it get any worse for them?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...section=justin
Brisbane is the captial of Queensland (a state of Australia) and the third largest city in the country. Video of the flash flooding yesterday was just jawdropping and every last drop of that is heading towards Brisbane....

Yeah, NOW is when the Aussies get worried about floods. The situation now is far more serious than when this thread was started. Tomorrow or the next day the city of Brisbane is going to look more like Venice. Nearly 80 people are missing in the state of Queensland already and my suspicion is that many of them will be dug out of the mud or pulled from submerged cars in the coming days. That footage of a wall of water smashing through Toowoomba... devastating.

Hang in there folks. Stay safe!

Just in the last 36 hours there's been 10 confirmed dead and over 90 missing. Many of the missing are likely to be found in the coming weeks, drowned in the wreckage of their oblitterated homes.


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These are the worst floods in recorded history.

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http://news.ninemsn.com.au/slideshow...land.slideshow

More pictures being added every minute it seems.
Some of them are funny, others scary, with a few just plan shocking.

I've returned to my true career of media monitoring. Guess what I'm mostly monitoring in the media at the moment...

I don't know what coverage there is overseas regarding the effected areas, but Grafton, at the southern end is my hometown. This flood really isn't anything out of the ordinary.
Brisbane and Queensland in general however is coping a hammering!

Sky and BBC have both been giving it a lot of coverage in the last couple of days...seem to have been focusing on Toowoomba (sp?) although one of them (I think the BBC) have sent a reporter to Brisbane.

What they have been showing looked pretty bad...I hope everyone manages to stay safe...