At 9am Thursday morning I noticed the creek was breaking its bank below the cabin (picture 1). Since I was suppose to be doing a solar power course up at Nimbin on the weekend I spent 15 mins packing camping gear and food for three days in case I couldn't get back home. Then I drove to Corindi SES - there was already water over the Pacific Hwy north of Corindi but I got through.

 

Less than an hour after I goto SES the requests for assistance started coming, earlier on we got thirty at once in a single refresh (update). Ended up with over 70 jobs, 11 Corindi members turned over the day, and lots of RFS and fire brigade support who made a huge number of sandbags. The Corindi creek broke its banks and flooded four houses which had to be evacuated (and we had to figure out what to do with them).

I stayed at the unit overnight since my neighbour Peter had rung to say the bridge near my place was 2+m underwater. The next day we finished off the jobs and packed up at 2:30pm. I drove back to Parker Rd to find there was still 50cm of water over the bridge and I had to wait 2.5 hours for it to go down. Several others crossed much earlier but it would be too embarrassing to get stuck on a flooded bridge in SES uniform.

  

 Here is the view from cabin once I finally got home at 5:30pm, creek is still over its banks.

I rang the course providers (Rainbow Power) and told them I couldn't make it, they run them ever 6 weeks or so, so hopefully can go to next one.

Do I really need a pipe crossing?

It's been raining steadily for days here (>100mm) and more to come, the Orara river to which my creek flows is in flood, and the creek is only a few feet from going over the nearby bridge (cutting me off from the highway).

My pipe crossing driveway (cost $5610) doesn't have any water flowing through it, not surprising since it's on the crest of a hill - thanks to the council for forcing me to over engineer!

Goanna and rain

 Caught this guy in a rat trap - from the look of his tail its not the first trouble he has been in.

We have had heaps of rain here and more forecast. The creek is up but still a metre or more to go before it goes over the bridge.

Pump troubles

30 Dec my pump stopped working in between cooking dinner and washing my hands afterwards (yummy lamb chops kindly donated by Cathy by her forgetting to take them home on Christmas day). The pump was very hot so I disconnected the wires (before I remembered it had its own circuit). I wasn't entirely surprised because the plumber had admitted he had never installed one like that (although he took the manual home overnight) and it had been noisy and seemed to flutter on/off. Also I didn't install a pressure accumulator because they guys who sold it to me (Rainbow power company who did my solar system) said it didn't need one as it's variable speed. Not a great time to get hold of the plumber (he did get back to me about 10 days later), but I also left message for my neighbour Peter (who was in Darwin). Back to lugging water and wow does a flushing toilet use alot of water. Six days later Peter got back to me to say his friend Jason would come around to look at pump. Turns out when I powered it up it worked! Jason explained they have a overheat cutoff. The next day I had a shower and after turned off tap could hear a humming - sure enough it was stuck on again. When I went out I could see it was leaking slightly onto the wires. Hopefully adding an accumulator and making sure the wires are not underneath any leaks should fix it.