01-18-2011, 02:10 AM
Just been through a traumatic few days.
You may have seen the flooding in the state of Queensland, Australia on your local news. We have had the wettest spring on record with rain on 68 out of 73 days. Local dams that were virtually empty two years ago very nearly reached their breaching points - the main dam is designed to have 100% capacity for drinking water and then another 125% for flood mitigation - and kit ended up having to have water released. Rural areas started to flood and the river levels started to rise.
We started looking at the flood maps and found that the bottom of our road was the predicted flood contour for our area - caused us only mild concern as we are ~2 m higher than that point. A few hours later another map was produced which placed the contour at the back of our garden!
We decided to do what we could to the house and to self-evacuate. We moved everything from the ground floor upstairs - books are bloody heavy - and packed our most important stuff into the cars - family, photos, and my collection. Then warned be police to move so ended up getting the cars out just before the water blocked our escape route.
In the end we were lucky the water did not rise to the predicted levels such that we ended up with no damage.
I guess the take home message from this is that you should make your collection easily portable so that it can be quickly removed from your property if the need arises - probably preaching to the converted for those in areas at risk! However, we didn't think we were in any danger as we had done searches to see whether our block had gone under in previous floods - it hadn't. Then along comes a once in a 100 year rain event.......
It is quite surreal to walk a few minutes from your undamaged property and see houses that were totally inundated - water over the roof level. Now suffering from a bit of survivor guilt so have been volunteering for the last few days to help in the local cleanup.
Simon
You may have seen the flooding in the state of Queensland, Australia on your local news. We have had the wettest spring on record with rain on 68 out of 73 days. Local dams that were virtually empty two years ago very nearly reached their breaching points - the main dam is designed to have 100% capacity for drinking water and then another 125% for flood mitigation - and kit ended up having to have water released. Rural areas started to flood and the river levels started to rise.
We started looking at the flood maps and found that the bottom of our road was the predicted flood contour for our area - caused us only mild concern as we are ~2 m higher than that point. A few hours later another map was produced which placed the contour at the back of our garden!
We decided to do what we could to the house and to self-evacuate. We moved everything from the ground floor upstairs - books are bloody heavy - and packed our most important stuff into the cars - family, photos, and my collection. Then warned be police to move so ended up getting the cars out just before the water blocked our escape route.
In the end we were lucky the water did not rise to the predicted levels such that we ended up with no damage.
I guess the take home message from this is that you should make your collection easily portable so that it can be quickly removed from your property if the need arises - probably preaching to the converted for those in areas at risk! However, we didn't think we were in any danger as we had done searches to see whether our block had gone under in previous floods - it hadn't. Then along comes a once in a 100 year rain event.......
It is quite surreal to walk a few minutes from your undamaged property and see houses that were totally inundated - water over the roof level. Now suffering from a bit of survivor guilt so have been volunteering for the last few days to help in the local cleanup.
Simon
