I’m no climatologist, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen storms with as much force as we’ve now experienced in Brisbane and South East Queensland three times in four days, most recently about an hour ago, and with another one also accompanied by severe hail and dangerous winds apparently on the way yet again later on tonight.
Here are some images licenced under Creative Commons from flickr. Two aren’t actually of the most recent storms, but for those who aren’t used to a classic Brisbane storm, they might provide a bit of a lightning flash of illumination. Over at Circulating Library, there are also some contemporary photos to look at. Taking photos might be a tad risky, actually, as one of the two deaths from the storms has been a young man who unwisely tried to photograph a stormwater drain at Chermside on Sunday night. Via Stilgherrian, you can also have a squizzy at archived radar images of last night’s storms here. When I checked at around 5pm it was impossible to get on to the BOM site to check tonight’s storms on their way, and the site also couldn’t cope with the traffic just after the ABC weather at the end of the news.
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/brisbane-storm-1.jpg"
courtesy of Garry’
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/brisbane-storm-2.jpg"
courtesy of supernicko
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/brisbane-storm-3.jpg"
courtesy of Michael Henderson
We’ve been fairly lucky here at New Farm – although getting off the bus just before I experienced the hail and the alarums and the torrential downpour and the water rushing down the streets first hand. Things have been fairly tough for folks in The Gap and now Paddington and some of the other Western suburbs, and other parts of South East Queensland, particularly around Ipswich where the Bremer River is at levels not seen since the 1974 floods. Most people I talked to today had a story about the downpour that hit at around 1am last night, and a lot of people seem to have slept very badly… but certainly one of the outcomes of these sort of events is a little more chatting to and smiling at people in the neighbourhood than happens routinely.
The authorities appear to have been responding well – much better in many ways than the last (isolated) freak storm in 2004. But given the flooding of the inner city bypass tunnel and also the closure due to flooding of the King George Square bus station this morning which had me and a friend hiking up to Roma Street station to get the bus to CI at QUT, Campbell Newman might like to reconsider the tunnel obsession. Contingency plans for transport don’t appear to have been ideal, and again – I’m as little of an engineer as I am a climatologist, but you do have to wonder whether the design of recent transport infrastructure really anticipated what occurs when heavy rain falls. It might not happen with the rather ominous regularity and intensity we’ve seen over the last few days and nights, but we are in the subtropics after all. My flatmate and I were just discussing how well our building – put up as were so many New Farm apartment houses in the 1960s by Italians – has coped. We’re of the view that the garages would have been flooded had it not for basically very well thought out design.
There are no doubt tons of links and stories around, but I’d be very interested in local people’s stories, and any photos and personal blogs people might have seen or written. Anyway, fingers crossed that if we are hit by another wave of water late tonight, it doesn’t add too much to the wreckage and destruction a lot of people are already coping with.
Mother Nature sure knows how to show her colors off to the best advantage. Lovely shades of green, grey and white and the lighning was unbelievable. Bit of hail, lots of wind which cleaned dead stuff from the trees. Big clean up tomorrow. Its OK to marvel when no damage has been done though. Remember the storms years ago that swept in just as everyone was leaving work!
I agree taking pictures is risky; I took the ones I’ve posted on Circulating Library from the safety of my back verandah, well under shelter; it just happened to get a good view of the storm. I wouldn’t want to head out into this weather to photograph, not judging from what Sunday’s storm did to The Gap.
Well, I’d have to agree with your thoughts on the tunnel vision around Brisbane. In fact, the frightening amount of road infrastructure work going on at the moment seems very out of line with my amusement at a stand-still today on the Western Freeway outbound between Toowong roundabout and Indooroopilly. I watched a bus, with a grand total of four passengers (oh we love our public transport here because it is so reliable), sitting also at a complete standstill, while I heard in the distance the train rocketing through Indooroopilly a few blocks away.
When are people going to get that buses are at the mercy of traffic just like cars? Buses are not the intelligent way of the future of public transport, unless they are part of an integrated plan.
On the storm front, it was nice to watch from the safety of a home that still has its roof and walls.
Catriona, yep, when I was waiting in the Valley for a bus back home at about 6.30pm I was wishing I had my camera with – the light was fairly amazing. But later I decided that walking back from the bus stop in the hail and rain and getting soaked through may not have been all that good for said camera!
Megan – I got the bus along Coro drive from Indooro to the City yesterday – around 4pm. I think we spent about 50 minutes inching forward between Toowong and town. I was kicking myself for not walking down the hill and hopping on the train. Whatever they were doing with the lane thing made no sense to me at all – the outbound traffic was flowing reasonably freely. It reminded me that one of the reasons I moved from St Lucia to New Farm was the extreme frustration that public transport in the western suburbs induces!
I slept right through the worst of it and woke up to discover that Rosalie – just 400 metres away, was blasted by the storm. And only just down the road – I have to say in the former creek bed along Torwood St – there were signs of water reaching a metre up and plenty of poor buggers drying out their car interiors.
On the site of the old tennis courts and the bowlo at Milton they will build a multi-story tower and I bet … a basement car park. That will be below the level of the creek.
Transport planning is also shocking … with the western line trains out, the cricket finishing, and another storm about to hit, what options did you think I had to get from South Brisbane where I work to Torwood/Auchenflower where I live at 6.30pm. It’s a linear distance of about 2 or 3 kms. Luckily I could get a 199 over to the city … from there, hunt for a bus, of basically 2 that I could catch (the 471 last service leaves 6.15, natch), and walk the last km in the rain.
Apart from the 11 million litres that ended up in the city bypass tunnel, there were quite a few road closures around the place. The outbound Centenary Highway was 3 lanes into 1, so long delays. There was a lane closed on Stuartholme road because of a rock fall. The bridge over Ithaca Creek near the bowls club near us (Bowman Parade) was flooded for the first time in years.
I believe they had 243mm in four hours out at Rosewood. We had 118mm last night and about 250mm since Monday.
Everything was fine at our place.
The Courier Mail gallery of pics starts here. It’s a bit of a jumble, but I like the ones of threatening skies. There is a great one of the storm rolling over Bribie at 30 and another at 224.
There’s one of a guy mowing his lawn with Armageddon approaching in the bachground at 50.
The first pic of lightning is not until 143 but the best are taken from Milton at 211.
There are more readers’ pics here some of the cleanup here including some the more spectacular ones of shattered houses.
Then thre’s a further 78 pics of flooding. This is the Bardon Bowls Club just down the road from us.
The kids and I nearly got wiped out at Roma st Parklands this evening. The youngest one listens to commercial radio (yes i know), and really wanted to see a charity concert they were doing this afternoon.
Storm got so bad the entire cast, crew and crowd were huddled up on the stage together, in the dark while we were absolutely battered by wind and rain, then moved down backstage till it passed.
Lots of beautiful trees over, which is plenty sad
The flooding of the ICB tunnel was apparently caused by the simplest of engineering element failures: sensor stuff-up floods tunnel the BrisbaneTimes headlines it.
The Oz picks up the above Fairfax man-made-disaster story today, Friday, but will the more quotidien, and local-political-discourse-determining, Courier? Or Channel 2/7/9/10 News?
The whole
edifice of the engineered-futurehardhat fantasy that the ever-so-contractor-friendly Campbell and Anna are come-hell-or-high-water determined to deliver us up to is looking pretty shaky when such simple and (you-would-have-thought fail-safe) systems can’t be reliably implemented by these administrations’ preferred tenderers. Bilge pumps aren’t exactly a novel idea, or rocket science, lets hope they never have carriage of a submarine contract.For the emerging scandal of the Brisbane tunnel financial engineering failure, see last night’s 7.30 report.
Fantastic clouds. I’m in Taiwan, the home of the typhoon, and Brisbane (which I flew through to get here) has the typhoons.
Am I gonna get back Sat’dy morning? Or be diverted to Broome?
The bloke mowing his grass with what looks like something out of Independence Day behind him is amazing.
Yes, the photos are quite incredible, thanks to Brian et al for the links. I kept sort of half-expecting to see an alien mothership emerge from the clouds, like they do.
Hope that, though we’re busy admiring the raw natural beauty, the damage to people and property was nonetheless at a minimum.
These are a similar sort of “arty” storms like the ones often seen in Texas, which further reinforces my half-baked idea that Australia is to the Commonwealth as Texas is to the US…
Apparently the mining town of Blackwater west of Rockhampton copped a flogging from a wild storm with golfball sized hail last night.
Maybe the hail was a bit bigger than that.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/cricket-ballsized-hail-pummels-blackwater/2008/11/20/1226770648700.html
What State then do you see as being to the US as Canada is to the Commonwealth?Ditto for New Zealand.
GregM — New Zealand is analogous to Massachusetts, except without the benefit of having MIT, Tanglewood, Amherst, or the few remaining non-insane parts of Harvard within its remit.
Canada so far as I can tell corresponds not to a specific US state, but to the New York Times (which has really become its own sort of pan-national meta-state of Timesistan). Both Canada and the NYT have produced an extraordinary number of fine comedians, and a few of the Canadians even knew it.
Any hope of getting some of this down in Melbourne over the next little while?
They’re expecting between 20-40mm in the coming two days, but we really REALLY need some decent (not destructive though) rain after so many years of drought.
Living as I do where Highgate Hill, South Brisbane and Woolloongabba snuggle against one another, I found myself in the tragic position of being confined to the Redbrick Hotel for longer than I’d intended to stay, drinking more beer than I’d intended to drink, while the storm passed over. Fortunately the grass has regrown over the bank leading down from Stephens Road to the door of my flat, meaning that I no longer find myself silted in by runoff after a seriously big downpour. More generally, like New Farm the inner southside seems to have missed the really damaging highly localised weather events which have struck less fortunate parts of Brisbane and SEQ.
Steve: they’ve upped the ante, RN news just reported Emerald had hail the size of …. Rockmelons!!
Not nice to see storms anywhere – reminds me a bit of the storms 7 years or so ago in Sydney that took off the roof capping of our house. I went up the next day to put a tarp on it, had a look around and saw whole roof collapses all around us.
Mind you, the side effects of the QLD weather down in here Armidale have been fascinating. It’s humid here this week, not quite sub-tropical but definitely different from the dry heat you would expect up here. There are little pockets of vestigial rain forest all through New England, so with this humidity I’m very tempted to try a couple of tree ferns in the back yard and see how they go.
In a decade, New England could become dairy country.
This is very similar to the 1996 storm which flooded the lower carpark of Toombul and saw Enoggera Creek spill out on to Northey St.
I had a meeting last night which finished up just as there was a complete break in the rain so I was able to ride home without too much trouble. I was worried it was going to start pissing down (or worse, hailing) so I rode like blazes.
Our place in Wooloowin hasn’t been affected at all. I know someone in The Gap whose only problems were muddy paw prints all over the house, a wet towel rack (and all the towels) in the bathroom and the loss of power for 55 hours (she was one of the last 3000 or so to get power back).
Another friend’s had to deal with their church getting flooded (Ferny Grove/Keperra) and is probably thanking his lucky stars he doesn’t have to catch a train to uni ever again. Track closures are going to make this even harder for people out Ipswich and Ferny Grove way.
Best wishes for those of you affected by this awful weather in Queensland. Do hope you aren’t going or are yet to go through too much trauma.
I’m paranoid something similar will happen in Armidale, but so far its just howling winds.
Chris:
Maybe you can explain what’s going on down there with water. It’s of interest to the nation in that your new sugarloaf pipeline for feeding Melbourne’s water habit looks set to further seriously tax the Murray, even as Adelaide is weaning itself off it.
The most up to date figures I can get for Melbourne daily average water use is 303 litres per capita. Here in South East Queensland, we responded to our water crisis by getting our usage to less than 140 l/day for over a year, less than half melbourne’s usage rate, which thus looks a bit inconsiderate. Are Melburnians twice as dirty or something? Or just possessed of an outrageous sense of entitlement and none of discipline? Like the member for Higgins.
Maybe the generous water tank rebates the city council and state government put up here, and I gather not there, has something to do with it.
So re: your “”Any hope of getting some of this down in Melbourne” plea…See what happens when you do the hard yards … we did the water savings, and Huey rewarded us with rain. Try it.
Awesome climate disaster porn links, Brian! (cf. Marcia Langton) Apologies if I’ve violated the ‘no pomo’ rule
I don’t think we have a no pomo rule, dk.au! Klaus is right – what we were saying was the use of pomo in newspaper columns is what is objectionable!
Sadly, no, j_p_z. The local rag is reporting that the latest estimate of damage to property and infrastructure is half a billion dollars.
Looking on the bright side, I suppose rectifying all the mess might do something to stimulate the economy!
And we’re looking at another thunderstorm this arvo, apparently. Even if this one isn’t so violent, the obvious problem is that it further batters already shattered and damaged houses and delays cleanup/repair, and so compounds the damage. Sunday night’s was exceptionally violent, but the succession of really severe storms has made things exponentially worse.
The storm this arvo didn’t eventuate. I think they had one further up the coast, but nothing too serious. There’s another chance tomorrow night and another significant rain event from about next Wednesday.
I was talking to my sister and my nephew who lives near Marburg had 185mm on Wednesday night and knows someone who had over 300.
I’ve heard one horror story about an insurance assessor. A woman living by herself and now retired had had new box guttering installed. The fool who put it up didn’t get the levels right so when the gutters overflowed, as gutters always will at some time in this climate, the water washed back onto her ceiling. The insurance assessor accused her of having it done deliberately just so she could have the pleasure of water running through her ceiling and ruining all her stuff!