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!

Hope that, though we’re busy admiring the raw natural beauty, the damage to people and property was nonetheless at a minimum.

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.

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.

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.

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.