23 February 2013

Pictures at last

Apologies for the long delay.  Its been a time of cleaning up, replanting and then business at work, and also a time of lots more rain, so not great conditions for photo taking.  But here is an overview of the cyclone, taken a few days after once the water had largely receded, but was none still flowing.  A large river of water was flowing through the property above, collecting all the forest debris with it and dumping it all on our fence line

So not surprisingly, the leaf litter built up, blocking the water, and causing our fence to topple over yet again (third time in two years with similar storms)

From here, the water went rushing into the dam.  It looks like a trickle in the picture above but was a raging river the day before.  And as our property is essentially a bowl, water was also pouring down from the road and down the gully, all channeling into the dam which burst its banks in no short order.

In previous flooding, it was overflowing on the right side of the dam, but with the cyclone, it was overflowing on both side of the dam wall.

We planted our bananas at the bottom of the gully so that any water flowing down would be captured. But we hadn't planned for this kind of volume and the river ended up taking both our first fruiting bananas out.

Then both overflows meet and channel under the road through the causeway pipes.  These are two considerable pipes and we weren't sure they could take the volume when the water was at its height.  Here is a pic after the levels had dropped
Shaun had connected the new overflow tank, to capture any excess water off the house tanks, the day before the cyclone started.  he 10,000 litres tank filled up overnight and the pressure was so great that it sprung a leak
I'll put some pics of the damage in my next post, but hopefully this gives you a sense of the sheer volume of water that Brisbane experienced, despite not being the worst hit area.

1 comment:

  1. Glad you're all OK. But sorry about the banana trees... :(

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