Inliners International Forums General Discussion Bench racing Australia

There are 20 registered members of II in Australia with about half from the Queensland area that is being hammered by floods. Here's hoping they make it through this weather safely.

Yes I got an e-mail from a friend that lives in the south and she said that the north was really getting hammered.

Thanks, for your thoughts ,as I write 15 people are dead & another 70 missing. Spirits are still high.
To give north American members an idea the flood is covering an area larger than California & Texas combined.
Small towns like Goodooga will be cut off for eight weeks.
My town Brisbane the river has now peaked but everything is still under water. I live on high ground but have been homebound as highways are cut, & authoritys ask that anyone who can stay home , please stay.

Living along the Mississippi River I know a little about flooding, but nothing of this magninitude. It's not like we can jump in the truck and come help. But, if there is anything that we can do, please let us know. I know that everybody here would do what they can to help our good Aussie friends. Please be safe!

I live well south of the flooding, so we are safe.

We have friends who lost their business in ispwich and really feel for them.

I know everyone I've spoken to down here are shocked by the devastation caused by the floods.

There are emergency appeals for funds going around. Maybe money is what people affected by the floods need.

Thankyou for your thoughts

You are in our prayers and if any country on earth deserves our help it is Australia. I am surprised that we are not hearing more about it.

It is surprising that the media here does not cover the disaster they are having.

The Weather Channel is giving periodic updates but they're brief and not encouraging at all. Big, terrible disaster.

If you get any cable or satellite BBC news, they are covering it very well.

Hello,
Yes the North is copping it at the moment,with 10's of thousands effected.
In the South,(where I am) it is wet also,but the flooding is not quite as bad.
The Queensland (north) floods are the biggest natural disaster to hit Australia in a long time. The death toll is about 16 so far,but still 50 or more unaccounted for,and as days go by,one would have to assume they are lost also. Many might never be found in the debris and mud.
Youtube has lots of videos, just dial in Queensland floods,or Toowoomba as key words.
Here is one to get you started.
Our TV channels are news 24/7 of the disaster. Makes you feel helpless in many ways. I am about 1200 miles from the centre of things.( fortunately)
and another one

and one from the air
regards,Rod

Is the Queensland area where the dry lakes are?? Been tooo many years since my geography courses. Travelling thru Canada right now and it's one of the big items on the news here. From what I'm hearing the loss of life is bad and also this area is called the bread basket of Australia and the crops are all destroyed so the disaster won't be over when the rain stops.

I'm in Sydney now, on my way to Melbourne tomorrow. The news has been covering the disaster extensively, some pretty heartwrenching stories. Sounds like some rivers are starting to recede, but the water is flooding others. One of our contacts here indicated that spring rains had helped ease ongoing drought and helped with bumper crops, but the recent flooding wiped out big portions of the great crop yield before they could be harvested.

The Australians are pretty amazing people. Last night news stories were about huge lines of people traveling to Queensland to offer their help and services, on their own! They were just arriving unasked with supplies and offering to help with everything from rebuilding infrastructure to just arriving at someones doorstep and offering to help clean out the mud. Whole familes with little kids and small business owners just showing up to help, pretty amazing. The ferries in Sydney are collecting thousands of dollars a day from commuters, you can watch the collection buckets get heavier as each ferry disembarks.

I've read there is now flooding in Melbourne, but hopefully its not too bad. I'll try and update when I get there, but the real disaster is still in Queensland.

Dave

I'm in Queensland, of course, and where I am we've had rain regularly for over six months. The ground is so saturated that it's no wonder that run-off from places like here is causing flooding.

But what happened in Toowoomba was the most devastating. Toowoomba is an inland city right on the top of the range with a population of 80,000. Some say they had 6" of rain inside an hour there, the place just copped a total bucketing and flash flooding damaged a lot of the place.

It was the run-off to the east of this that caused most loss of life. Most of the run-off went west, and it will continue to head west for many weeks to come, it runs into the Murray-Darling river system that comes out near Adelaide.

But that run-off to the east rushed down the mountains and boomed into creeks and rivers that were already brimming. One little town about 20 miles away had the water rise over twenty feet in seven minutes!

More bodies are bound to be found, but then there's the stories of cattle dozens of miles out to sea further north, where floods have been on for weeks, roads that are cut and expected to remain so for a month or more, towns that are having to batten down for another flood to come through after just cleaning up from earlier flooding.

This is the driest continent on earth copping solid rain, almost all over the continent, that's almost unprecedented in our history.

Was wondering when we would hear from you Ray since you are a regular Inline forum contributor. We hope that since you could connect here again that you are at least getting by to some extent. Various weather devastations in the US help us understand what you could be going through and we all hope for the best for you and your countrymen.

Yes, a big country is bound to offer a broad diversity in climates and disasters!

The question of the dry lakes... the biggest is Lake Eyre, which is right in central Australia in the northern part of the state of South Australia.

There's an awful lot of water rolling on down towards Lake Eyre. The floods in the north of Queensland will ripple on out through the farming areas and towns and head for Cooper's Creek, which eventually runs into Lake Eyre. This salt lake is below sea level, so it goes no further than that.

Lake Gairdner, where the regular speed trials are held, is further south in South Australia and probably relatively unaffected. If you google it, you can look at pics of when it flooded in 2006, which relies on relatively local rainfall because it doesn't get input from any of the catchments in the eastern states.

As for my lack of presence lately, I've been a bit hung up on things. One thing I'm trying to do is get a Hemi 6 engine project underway, and I'm also trying my hand at patternmaking to produce an adaptor to fit up the Hemi 6 to the A833 gearbox.