When the levee breaks

The view out my front window has looked like the above for the past two weeks and will probably look the same for most of the next as well, at least until Friday when my front window gets exchanged for a new one in the suburb next door. It's been absolutely fucking MISERABLE. Horizontal sleet, icy blasts from snow-capped surrounding hillsides, torrential rain, intermittent hail and seven degree daily maximas. But what we don't have is flooding, so we're one up on south-east Queensland for once; beautiful one day, underwater the next.

I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains...

It's almost always the case that for the fifteen minutes a year that rural Australia isn't in drought, the drought gets broken by floods, which wash the topsoil away, drown the cattle, get the tractor bogged and cause you to have to spend extended periods of time in the farmhouse with the missus. All amounting to yer local cockie to a fate worse than death, or even a Labor government.

And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
"We’ll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"If this rain doesn’t stop."

You get accustomed to it growing up in Australia, the land of the perennial nature-borne shitfight. As the old poem runs, if it's not drought it's flooding; if it's not flooding there'll be bushfires, dead set. Or you're being bitten by one or all of the nine of the ten deadliest snake species in the world which (still) call Australia home. That's if you manage to survive the redbacks, funnelwebs, box jellyfish, saltwater crocodiles, stingrays, baby-eating dingoes, killer koalas, sharks (particularly Cronulla Sharks on the pull), Melbourne cabbies performing hook turns, something important falling off your Qantas plane on the flight there, and Kyle Sandilands. Not being killed to death on a daily basis is a massive achievement for most Australians. And yet we survive, nay thrive; we adopt, adapt and improve.

Through bushfire, snakes and tinea
Drizzle, drought and flood
None of those'll hold 'em back
When someone calls out 'MUD!'

It's been a good few years since it flooded properly in south-east Queensland - and when it floods in SEQ it's almost inevitably going to flood in the corresponding region south of the border, the aptly named Northern Rivers area of New South Wales - which is both Northern and jam-packed full of Rivers, all fed from the ranges to the west and all swelling to the point of bursting at the banks following the heavy downpours of the past week or more. Riverside regional centres such as Lismore and Grafton have been evacuated already. To be fair, though, Lismore floods at the drop of a hat - the Wilson and Richmond Rivers through Lismore go into flood if someone upstream leaves their lawn sprinkler on too long - and any Grafton resident who complains about being evacuated to Coffs Harbour is an inbred fucktard. (Actually that sentence would work just as well without the 'who complains about being evacuated to Coffs Harbour' bit.) Grafton is one of the few places on the NSW North Coast which would be massively improved by being drowned by turd-brown floodwater. And given it lies in a natural basin through which the biggest of all the big rivers of eastern Australia flows through - the mighty Clarence - it gets the opportunity for same on a semi-regular basis.

Further downstream Maclean (the Scottish town in Australia, lest anyone forget) is also on evac standby. This pisses me off immensely. Not that Maclean couldn't also do with having large volumes of the Clarence flowing down its riverside esplanade, but this shit was oft promised and never delivered while I was there. Floods meant one thing and one thing only when I was at school: no school. But it never fucking worked out that way did it. While plenty of peeps from surrounding riverside communities - particuarly the cane farms along the banks and across the river islands of the Clarence - got mercifully cut off from town with just a few metres rise in river levels, nothing short of a tsunami was going to cut the road from the Broom given there were no significant water courses to traverse. So this poor bastard never missed a day due to natural intervention. I'm bitter and I'm jaded and I'm taking it to the grave with me dammit.

The last time the Maclean levee wall was broached were the floods of March 2001, when flatmate Craigos was trapped in Cessnock and missed the UQ O-Week pissup; a few months earlier Dawso, the Captain and I were required to stay on in Sin City after our New Years mission while floodwaters rescinded and the highway home dried out. In both cases both the Pacific Highway and the Sydney-Brisbane train lines had been cut by flooding. Where do you suppose the highway et al had been cut? Fuckin' Grafton. No surprises there.

As of five hours ago the river level at Maclean was 3.2 metres. The levee tops out at 3.3 metres. Another 50mm of rain is scheduled for the next 24 hours. Get your floaties on mah homies.

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
When the levee breaks, have no place to stay.

She'll be sweet. They'll sandbag the fucker up, and even if there's some dribble-past, the levee won't break. Basically, the whole post was an excuse to reference a fucking awesome Led Zep tune. Crank it up.



The Doctor is OUT.