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Saturday, December 4, 2010

River rises

Those of you who have been following the 'weather' discussions on this and other blogs will be aware that in my area we have had 178mm (7") of rain in 5 days. I feel for those who are currently experiencing very cold, icy and even heavy snow conditions but, believe me, this much rain at the start of our southern summer time just is a nuisance.

The cherry crop has been destroyed at Young, with fruit swelling and bursting from excess water take-up before it could be picked. Soft vegetable crops, such as lettuce, have been destroyed and supermarkets are currently flying in such crops from either South America or South Africa - those crops can take up to 10 days before they hit the shelves so, a few days after you buy them they are 'crap' - wilted mush!

Farmers who were expecting a bumper wheat crop have had their hopes dashed as this heavy rain just flattens their crop, making it useless and unable to be harvested.

All of this is going to have a flow-on effect and prices are already escalating. People are leaving many "fresh" vegetables and fruits on the shelves and looking to packaged frozen alternatives in the refrigerator and freezer sections - and, of course - the prices for those items has inexplicably increased!

Anyhow, back to our local situation, this is an image of our usually placid Yass River at Riverbank Park.

Just before the old iron railway bridge in the background is a concrete weir and footpath where one can cross the river.

Now, this is the river today - I took quite a number of shots but will only put a a selected few:

Remember I said their was a weir and footpath - its under all of this water. Those small trees on either side are where the bank normally is!

This is the water submerging the weir and the footpath as it boils over it:

This is an image of the waters rushing downstream, taken from the middle of the road bridge. Once again, the trees in the water are usually above the riverbank:

Remember in the first image, pre-flooding of the river, the pier supporting the road bridge where it was well back from the water's edge?


This shot is looking up the main street from the point on the road bridge where I took those images:

And again, the river upstream where it has cut the low level crossing between the North and South of town and even submerged the pedestrian walkway higher up on the bank (note the pine log fence - that's on the right of the roadway that's underwater and the pedestrian footpath on their left):

One last image, before I bore you all to death, LOL!:

More rain is forecast for the rest of the week right up until Friday. While we were watching all of this I said to Rhonda:

 "You know, we have three, possibly four generations of Australians most of whom have never experienced this volume of rain, yet, we two have seen more rain and more violent flooding than this!"

4 comments:

Sharon said...

Kind of like the rain we had up in Nashville, TN area the beginning of May. It was a Lulu!

Anonymous said...

Just a year ago we had a flood from rains that set new records. I live by the Suwannee River and the Withlacoochee River where they connect. They had records as far back as 100 years and we had a new flood level set. I live about a mile from the river and the water came up to my back door. Even so I was thankful for the water because if filled springs back up as well as the Florida aquifer. At the time we were setting records for new lows in droughts. Springs were drying up and so and the rain restored them.

Hopefully everyone is safe in your flood areas and your aquifer gets restored.

Jim said...

Great photos of all this John. That is one angry river right now! We had a lot of rain in southern Nova Scotia last month....it 'took out' a few bridges because of the effect on their supports.
Crazy weather indeed....everywhere. Today, for example, it is 10 degrees C. here in Nova Scotia with lots of rain. If this continues, things will begin to 'grow' and then die in the cold! Happened a couple of years ago.
Hang in there and hope you both dry out soon enough.
Jim

JohnD said...

Yes, Barabara, that's the 'up side' - our water tables had been getting very low with agricultural bores pumping out the aquafiers and soil moisture content was zero down to a metre depth. All this rain will assist in rectifying that aspect!