1 metre of rain in one weekend

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WELL hello friends. This weekend I was supposed to go up to Mount Glorious and do some more hiking up there. The weather forecast looked reasonably good earlier this week but over this weekend it has been absolutely horrendous.

It started raining about midday Friday. It is now about 3:00 in the afternoon on Sunday it looks like here we've had about 750 millimetres of rain (actually 900mm). Where I was going to head up at Mount Glorious had 1100 millimetres in the previous 2 days and add today's total it would be around 1500 millimetres. It is absolutely no condition for travelling. It has been a weekend at home trying to keep as dry as possible. A little bit of water did get into the garage and just a little bit into the office but apart from that everything is perfectly dry inside. Outside some of the landscaping beside the driveway has slid down the hill a little bit so when the rain clears I'll just clear that up. Apart from that, fingers crossed the rain will stop falling over the next couple of hours.

It's now the first break in the rain today (4:00 PM after about 400mm since early morning). This is what 900 millimetres in 52 hours looks like. Obviously a little bit of the landscaping here has come down, some of it has come down from next door. That's something for me to do tomorrow or this evening if it clears before dark. The weeds are growing very fast at the moment. I'll get the gate open. Looking at this landscaped creek, only a couple of stones came down. Overall this has held up very well. Some of the mulch has washed away from this little section here. There's a couple of weeds in there. Otherwise this is all in really good condition considering I had designed it for up to 100 millimetres per hour and up to 300 millimetres in a day. I never thought it would rain this much. A couple of stones did get dislodged. Apart from that all good. A little bit of water has gone into the garage but not much. Just need to seal some of those holes from when the last owners did their landscaping. Apart from this little channel here, everything held together well.

It is Monday morning now (the next day). It is early morning and I've just tidied up here putting all the gravel back in less than half an hour so all good. Now it's just a matter of the house (brickwork) to dry out a bit. The bricks are quite pourous so they have a lot of moisture in them at the moment. Apart from that everything is good now. It stopped raining about 8:00 last night so there was a 56 hour downpour. The most reliable rainfall information I got was from a nearby suburb with a rain guage reporting on the news there was about 430 millimetres yesterday, and 200 to 300 millimetres the previous two days. All up since lunchtime Friday up till 8:00 last night I had about 1030 millimetres, a metre of rain in one weekend. That's pretty amazing. That is about our median annual rainfall here in a whole year. It is more than twice the rainfall we normally get on a dry year. We usually have two rainy years followed by eight dry years. Fortunately I'm up here on top of a hill. The rivers, particularly the Brisbane River will be flooding for the next three to five days and some of the other rivers are flooding as well. Everyone's been ordered to stay at home if possible, so everyone will be working from home where they can. For me it's normal as I've been working from home for 5.5 years. All 600 schools in South East Queensland are shut today and probably for a few days and they've told everyone not to go sightseeing.

What I'll do now is open up all the windows and let all the dampness go. That will take about a week. So on that note, everything's all good having nicely survived a metre of rain in one weekend. Thanks friends for joining with me in this interesting weekend where I didn't go anywhere. Hopefully I'll be able to go somewhere next week depending on roads and tracks being open. Most of the highways and other roads are shut and all the public transport lines are down as well. Hopefully there will be enough open by next weekend for me to go somewhere. Until next time. Ciao for now.