BrisVegas had a HUGE storm last night. I know this to be true. Because I read it on the BBC News. Interesting that we had a ‘cyclone style storm’… here in the subtropics we just call them cyclones yeah? It was a pretty big storm that moved over the north west of Brisbane and it seems The Gap, Morayfield and areas in between were worst hit. (Pictures here – some of them are quite good photographically speaking)
Reports of green skies meant heaps of hail, strong winds knocking down 10m tall trees and 100,000 homes left without power. Ours wasn’t one of them for a change… the improvements to the power grid in our area must have spared us that. Rainwise here in the south-east we didn’t get any more of a dousing than we’d normally expect from a summer thunderstorm and while windy it was hardly cyclonic … but maybe that’s because of our newly installed 5m windbreaker out back. You know.. the one they optimistically call a noise barrier. It don’t stop jack shit in the noise department but seems to do a fair job at deflecting and redirecting wind.
So yeah… an extremely bad store… one person drowned taking photos down a storm drain (very ill advised behaviour in my book)… not sure how many injured… power cut off to thousands… trees uprooted… cars smashed…. localized flooding… rooftops blown away… hail damage to cars and buildings…. Bunnings and other hardware stores cashing in on generator and emergency lighting sales… other services disrupted including phone, internet, transport… emergency services overloaded… natural disaster zone declared by the Premier.
But even with all this… we live in a first world country and while it may take several weeks or months to clean up and sort out insurance claims and repairs etc no one here will have to worry about whether or not they can feed or shelter their family tomorrow as funds and resources have already been allocated to assist affected families, volunteers, SES workers and military resources are already on site and apparently working round the clock. We do live in the lucky country there’s no doubt about it.
Today it continued to rain all day long… just solid rain all day. Which means a couple of things – people seem more hurried to get on with things and get out of the rain… and this seems to make for more discourteous and ill tempered drivers than normal. Also more people decide to drive to work because they don’t want to walk to their buses/trains in the rain. Why do we give a shit about this? Well there’s quite twice as many cars on the road when we have wet weather AND NOT ONE IN TEN OF THEM HAVE THEIR HEADLIGHTS ON!!!
As someone who has a Rating One for life on their car insurance but has been involved in four serious motor vehicle accidents this is something I percieve as gross negligence and it pisses me off no end. I’m driving to collect the Small Child from school in the Pizza Caper car (because my car is in the shop to have the dent repaired) and it’s a black Suzuki Swift covered in bright orange sign writing. Now I’d do this in my bright red car anyway but especially because today I was in a predominantly black car and the roads are grey, the skies are grey and visibilty is impaired in the rain so I have the head lights on from the minute I turn on the ignition until I reach my destination. But do you think anyone else is trying to improve their visibilty on the road? Noooo. Why would they do a sensible thing like that?
Especially up near the school. There’s kids darting everywhere to get to their cars or bolt home and stay as dry as possible and the usual line up of flashy luxury 4WDs is even pushier than normal because everyone wants to get home… and NONE of them have their headlights on. Jesus people, these are our kids running about… surely you want them to see you coming. I don’t get it. Everyone is supposed to put their headlights on in the rain… and you’d think people who have silver, black or gunmetal grey cars would be particularly diligent knowing how easily they camouflage into the landscape under rainy conditions but no one seems to give a shit.
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