[scotty]

There's fuckin' water everywhere. The river that flows through my town rose 10.5m causing the evacuation half the downtown population and the CBD. Our house, thankfully, is out of the floodzone so we were quite safe and the new levee, which was finished about a month ago, kept most of the water out of the middle of Lismore. The road out to my sons school is continously blocked for 5km and the other night on my way home from work I had to drive about 200m through 1 1/2 foot deep water (pretty stupid, I know, because i didn't know exactly how deep the water got although it was running quite slow).

The race track stands,which are at least 20m high,have floodwaters literally halfway up them and all the playing fields in town are under at least 2m of water. We've had some amazing amount of rain since last Sunday, like 750mm or something, 500mm in the 48 hours until yesterday morning.

Its been absolutely amazing to watch how things like this happen, it was really quick but slow at the same time. I mean, it had been raining a lot with no sign that was going to flood and then all of a sudden, the place is underwater with helicopters rescuing stranded people and SES boats motoring about the place taking people to their homes or to evacuation centres. On the one hand it is fuckin' awesome to see Mother Nature do her work in such an extreme way, but devastating to watch peoples lives getting washed downriver firsthand.