Weather Mayhem

I'm glad we've moved. By the looks of it our old house in Doncaster could be under 4ft of water now! We've been looking at the photo's on the UK news sites and we're flabbergasted - we've never seen anything like it in South Yorkshire. It was particularly strange seeing the picture of the fish lying in the middle of the road on Brightside Lane in Sheffield. I used to drive down there to work.

While firefighters are battling to save power supplies in Doncaster, we had our own power outage yesterday. Shortly after Rach arrived home from work she heard a massive bang outside, and a second later all the power went off. It turned out a truck hard gone round a sharp bend too fast, about two streets away from our house, and careered straight into an electricity telegraph pole. The electricity company responded pretty quickly but the damage was that bad it took them a few hours to get the power back on. When I got home from work we ended up having to go out for dinner as the lights were still out. They finally managed to restore power about 9pm.

As for the rain, we've had a fair amount of it in Brisbane over the last few days and people are hoping it might finally bring an end to the drought. According to the Brisbane Courier Mail, grass has begun to poke through the cracked shores of Wivenhoe Dam. When the Queensland Government public broadcast comes on telly advising people that they need to hit the target of no more than 140 litres per person a day, and shows a pictures of a dry, cracked dam, I thought the pictures were simply graphics exaggerated for effect. I didn't realise it is in fact that bad.



Today's combined dam water levels for South East Queensland is at 18.04%. There's been level 5 water restrictions here since the 10th April because the dams have been consistently under the 20% mark. What this means is that living in a odd-numbered house we're only allowed to use bucketed water (not hosepipes) on the garden or car on Tuesday's, Thursday's and Saturday's between 4pm and 7pm, amongst other restrictions.

We seem to be the only people moaning about the rain in Brisbane. The natives here look at the pictures of the floods in England with envy!