Woebegone revisited

Talking of insurance. On early Sunday morning, I was up early watching the sun rise when the sky started to white out with the rain.  They were the medium size drops of a temperate area rather than the big drops I was use to in Queensland.  But many, many more, misting out the distance. Automatically, like I did on Russell, I took the bristle broom and started sweeping the water accumulating on the patio.  The water lapped at the patio door and I swept harder. Fortunately, the Gods gave up before I did. We didn't have contents insurance and the carpet would have been soaked.  Eeek!
We now have content coverage. It was cheap.

The complex basement was badly flooded because the electricity was shorted out and thus the expensive new pump the body corporate installed recently did not work. It is a good thing that the water didn't rise anymore than the bottom of the car doors.  Even so, the people with the lower storage lockups have a lot of cleaning up to do. Wet mattresses smell gross.

Two more photos that I took yesterday that show the force of the creek's once in a hundred years flash flood.

 The downed fence was about 100m away from where I was sitting.  About a kilometre away, at the Dickson shopping centre, a concrete section of the waterway was ripped off, swept downstream and ended up in the catcher grate designed to prevent victims from being drowned in the tunnel under Northbourne Avenue. It was installed 40 years ago when a similar flood on the South side of Canberra took the lives of five kids in the 1970s.   Probably the worse long term damage was  to the ANU's Chifley Library basement archive but we don't know to what extent. Serious questions are being asked about the capacity of the floodways with the size of the developments being done along the light rail corridor.

All is quiet now.  The creek barely trickles.

Tomorrow we celebrate Nancy's birthday with tickets to the French Film Festival opening night. Appropriately the film is titled "C'est La Vie".