The weather this week has been wild! On Tuesday, it started raining around midnight -1:00. I lay awake for an hour or so because the rain and wind were so loud. By about 8:00, we had received 96 mm of rain here (about 4 inches). All the ditches were full, and the corner creek in our paddock down the hill was overflowing. The cows were up here, so they were all right, and both pens of chickens happened to be on high enough ground that they were fine. About 10:00, a neighbor from down the hill stopped in to let us know that the paddock was flooding, in case we didn’t know already. He told us that the main creek down there was still rising. Mr. Imagination and I walked down to make sure the chickens were still all right. By then, the sun was shining brightly. This is what we saw. The first picture is our paddock, with water pouring into the corner creek (to the right) from the main creek from two directions: under the road, and beside the milking shed. There are normally two drainage ditches through the paddock, the one curving in the middle of this picture and the one to the left, but on this day, there was water everywhere it could be. The other two pictures show the neighbor’s paddocks across the road, where the floodwater from Orwell Creek was covering everything.
Here’s a video of what we were seeing.
After we returned to the house, Esther took the girls down to the river to see the flood there. There were trees down in the Domain. The second picture shows the Ahaura River, about as full as we’ve ever seen it. Then, they walked the other way, down in the direction of the confluence of the Grey and Ahaura Rivers. Obviously, there was no way to get close! The entire valley was under water.
After that, they walked down to our paddock. The water had dropped a bit, but was still pretty impressive!
The next day, Mr. Imagination took these video clips in the paddock. They’re not very easy to watch, but the footage of him petting an eel is pretty amazing!
Two days later, another storm came through. This one “only” gave us 60 mm (2 1/2 inches), but the wind! It was the worst wind we’ve experienced here. The children were doing school in the kitchen, and looked out just in time to see a huge tree across the road fall down! We were immediately thankful that our cattle were not there. They often graze there, and in fact, they’ll be there tomorrow! They would have been sheltering under the tree, and the entire herd would have been destroyed. It’s a little hard to see here, but the tree is laying on its side behind the electric pole.
This is the size of the rootball!
This is the kind of view we have had out our window many days this month!
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