Everybody OK?
A friend of mine took this shot in Newcastle yesterday:
Image Credit: originally uploaded by ssoross1
This is the pile of spiky palm fronds I had to pick up off the street so my neighbours didn’t puncture their tires or their feet:
Image Credit: originally uploaded by tigitogs
But no leaks, no roof flying off, no tree falling on the house/car/fence, so all in all pretty good. How are the rest of you?
Check in so we know our regulars are fine, and if you’ve got photos up on flickr or photobucket of storm stuff, leave us a link?
How are things after the storm? Sun out yet?
Still heavily raining here in Sydders. The wind’s died down though.
Snow here in the North this morning, good cover, just about gone now thank goodness! (That is a good photo of the ship)
Clear blue skies on Mid North Coast. Almost swimming weather if not for pesky sodden beach. Maybe tomorrow.
Some absolutely amazing lighting/thunder in this part of Sydders (M to tha ‘ville) ‘end of the world’ style thunderclaps, window-thumping gusts — reminds me of the Great Storm of ‘99…
Ooh. The wind is winding up again. Bugger.
Yoiks, good gracious, that looks like quite a storm. A brave night to cool a courtesan, as the clown once said to the crazy old king. Hope all youse aussies are high and dry.
On the bright side, though, if anybody’s looking for a quick gig as an English nanny, I guess you could just step outside, open an umbrella, and fly away…
it’s started up again here too tigs, & the rain is coming in vertically from the south, haven’t seen that for awhile.
my letterbox took a tumble, the lemon tree is on a bit of lean and the shed door blew in – all 1 minute repair jobs.
like you, 110% ok and nothing serious to report.
Here on the Central Coast it seems that we have come through unscathed but everywhere around us seems in trouble (loss of power, water or flooding).
The rain is back at a 45% angle as the wind picks up again.
sorry, meant the rain is coming in horizontally, i’ve actually woken up with a streaming head cold – and worse, the fecking swannies are losing again….
From here in the bush (ie. outside Sydney) you always seem to get rain when it’s dry elsewhere. Maybe what’s happening now is some sort of cosmic balancing of the accounts in a strange way. I like a vigorous storm, especially thunderstom, but not that!
Hope you all stay safe and well and dry under-roof.
I forgot to mention the disintegrated garden arch. I’m going to have to work out a new way to support the Peace rose and the honeysuckle.
Yikes guys
Hang in there.
Tigtog, i thought you said disintegrated golden arch for a moment, and couldnt see the problem
3.00am & a rather large limb from one of my gums decided to fall on the neighbour’s powerline – which a chipper fellow chainsawed away at 6.00 just passed in pissing rain & still howling wind. & the power’s back on – just as well – the rather awfully nice Elysium Hunter Valley verdelho needs that hint of chill. Kitchen full of friends cooking & there’s another few bottles to be consumed yet. Still raining, still windy, & the garden has been flattened. Sigh. Another wine then…
Tigtog:
Thanks for this post – news media gives us the big picture – this give a personal touch. [btw, roses can take a lot of punishment; don't know about honeysuckle though]
ShaunC, CK et al:
Glad to hear everyone who checked in is “weathering the storm”fairly well.
j-p-z:
Wasn’t Atlantic City given a similar pummelling a few years back?
This evening I discovered that a very sturdy bougainevillea tree, with several branches, against a fence, had shifted position – it seems to have been lifted up by the roots and is halfway to falling over. It’s just started raining again – lashing rain.
Our friends near Gosford are still without electricity though luckily they also have gas.
Hopefully the worst has passed. The BOM radar doesn’t show any major rain and the expected bad weather this evening may have no eventuated.
Like many on the coast, the In-Laws have been without power for over 24 hrs. They tried to buy a generator but none are left on the Central Coast. Hell of a lot of traffic on the road today. I guess that those without power were heading to places like Erina Fair for food, supplies or just a hot meal.
This morning I woke up to this story on NewsRadio about a family that was lost “when a giant fissure opened up in a busy Central Coast road during Friday’s furious storm.”
Just terrible! Would that have been near where you were, Shaun?
It seems there was snow in the Upper Hunter region.
Amazing!
My two favourite Novacastrian photographers are on the case up there: Tim Christie and Matt Packer.
Brian,
A tragic, heartbreaking accident.
Somersby is on the outskirts of Gosford (above it really) near Kariong across the F3 freeway. About a 15 minute drive. I still can’t believe that our little area (East Gosford) suffered no major damage considering that many areas around us were in trouble.
Please don’t tell me its global warming. I just love the taste and smell of carbon dioxide its the waste stuff of the processes that has placed butter on our bread ,kept the car we love going . Those floods by the way are just part of a cycle, happened back in the early 50ths, guess what Vic is about to see the barwon break its banks as part of that cycle. Some of you guys im sure will hammer on about how we are destroying the planet ,I may be a relic of times passed but those that would believe they can domesticate nature are playing hide and seek big time.
sandy, I don’t see them so much part of a cycle as unusual events. There was a stream of cloud from the north-west into central Queenslanf in a shallow surface trough in a big high centred over the Bight. This was joined by an upper air low that came up from Victoria, bringing wide-spread and unseasonal rain to a large part of Qld. As it moved off the coast it developed into a low which floated down the coast, intensifying as it went.
Back in August 2002 we had a surface low that started near Adelaide and moved northeast. We got 100mm (4 inches) out of it. Yeppoon, near Rockhampton, from memory, where it ended up getting about seven times that.
They are just odd things that happen from time to time.
Very happy to hear all our NSW friends are safe and sound!
Brian. The words ‘cyclonic winds’ and ‘eye of the storm’ -the latter to explain a lull period experienced before winds and rain began again, were used in radio weather reports during the event, not necessarily by BOM people.
You described it as a low that intensified off the north coast.
Are we talking of a real cyclone here which may have a global warming link or just a bit of laissez faire with the language?
On another aspect it is stunningly good accuracy of predictions on flood heights by departmental people in NSW that probably won’t get the attentive appreciation that they deserve. The 14.1 m peak in Singleton was spot on and the 10.7 versus a possible 11.4 in Maitland was reasonable and a vindication of the effect of various engineering spillover features that form part of the extensive flood mitigation works in those parts of the lower Hunter.
My heart goes out to the poor family at Somersby and commiserations to the thousands still without power on. Expect some political fallout on both.
It’s an interesting question, pablo. I saw the tight pressure gradients and it looked like a cyclone to me.
There is an explanation at Wikipedia. Apparently there are six differnt types including ’subtropical’, extratropical’ and ‘polar’. Looking quickly it could perhaps conform with a subtropical cyclone. I’d think the development of an eye would be critical.
A couple of weeks ago there was a tropical cyclone in the Coral Sea. The BOM guy at the time said that it wouldn’t come westwards because the prevailing winds further up in the atmosphere would sheer it off and push it away. I’d think a tropical cyclone piles up a lot higher than a subtropical one.
Saved by fate – we drove down from Singleton and flew back to Brisbane from Newcastle on Thursday afternoon. It was pissing down in Singleton, fine in Maitland and bucketing dowg at Newcastle airport (got soaked just getting the bags out of the car). We were early – were going to be doing another night in the Valley and flying out Friday lunchtime. We were visiting a mine – it was pretty muddy after a bit of rain overnight, but they thought they’d get going again by nightshift! Don’t think that happened….
Just on the climate change thing, it seems we can’t even say that it is part of an emerging La Nina. But I found Roger Stone’s comments interesting:
And, he says, the dry subsoils didn’t help, increasing land-slips.
And Wendy Craik says that a little bit of the rain fell on the other side of the Great Divide. She said at least we had broken the 11 straight run of record low inflows to the Murray-Darling in May.
I gather she’s looking more to the snow falling in the Alps, though.