It has rained in Armidale for the last 20 hours and it's still coming down. Over that period we have received almost 75 mm (3 inches) after a longish dry period and the waters have risen so fast that the part of the town north of Dumaresq Creek, our main waterway, is almost cut off from the south ... including the business centre. Normally, the creek is very slow moving and is well-contained within its banks - about the size of the River Jordan I once viewed from the Palestinian territories. Athletic people can leap across it in a single bound. But today it broke its banks in many spots and delivered us a flood of almost biblical proportions. Those who have been here will scarcely recognise the images below snapped in the pouring rain with my mobile phone.
The first view looks downstream across the low-level Faulkner Street crossing which cars were banned from using. The pedestrian bridge behind it is still available for pedestrians, not that any were out in this weather!
These two views look west and south from the same spot showing most of creeklands, as we call them, under water. Fortunately, the council was advised many years ago by one of my colleagues that creeklands are for floods and urban development is very limited.
Again looking westwards, the water has almost reached the doors of the Ex-Services Club, of which I'm a member.
Here we're looking upstream and downstream respectively, with the university, which is fortunately elevated on a hill-top being about 2 km upstream. You cannot see in either direction the bicycle path which I usually take from home to 'work' and I suspect that this route will be out of bounds for a few days.
As Dot and I were driving around taking these photos I kept a sharp lookout for any Arks. It would have been nice to have seen a couple of giraffes and a couple of lions floating downstream, though the former would have had difficulty ducking beneath the various bridges spanning the creek in a north-south direction. I also tried to calculate the amount of rain that would to fall in our local catchment before I would need to construct a sufficiently large Ark to float all of our possessions downstream. Fortunately we're reasonably safe. Our house is 37 m (or 121 feet or 50% of the length of a jumbo jet) above the creek so it's very unlikely I'll have to use my woodworking skills and borrow a book on Ark construction from the local library.
AS
The first view looks downstream across the low-level Faulkner Street crossing which cars were banned from using. The pedestrian bridge behind it is still available for pedestrians, not that any were out in this weather!
These two views look west and south from the same spot showing most of creeklands, as we call them, under water. Fortunately, the council was advised many years ago by one of my colleagues that creeklands are for floods and urban development is very limited.
Again looking westwards, the water has almost reached the doors of the Ex-Services Club, of which I'm a member.
Here we're looking upstream and downstream respectively, with the university, which is fortunately elevated on a hill-top being about 2 km upstream. You cannot see in either direction the bicycle path which I usually take from home to 'work' and I suspect that this route will be out of bounds for a few days.
As Dot and I were driving around taking these photos I kept a sharp lookout for any Arks. It would have been nice to have seen a couple of giraffes and a couple of lions floating downstream, though the former would have had difficulty ducking beneath the various bridges spanning the creek in a north-south direction. I also tried to calculate the amount of rain that would to fall in our local catchment before I would need to construct a sufficiently large Ark to float all of our possessions downstream. Fortunately we're reasonably safe. Our house is 37 m (or 121 feet or 50% of the length of a jumbo jet) above the creek so it's very unlikely I'll have to use my woodworking skills and borrow a book on Ark construction from the local library.
AS
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