Take That, Australia: We Can Flood, Too!

Liz here:

Friday Night, 11:54 pm:
It’s been rainy a lot lately, but there hasn’t been anything quite as bad as today. When I woke up this morning, it was raining: a thick, heavy rain that coated the streets and pavements. When I walked into town at noon, it was raining, and I sat in the library writing soaking wet. When I walked home at two it was raining. When I walked into work at four it was raining. All through work it rained; people sat inside, with their candles lit, clustered together around placemats and garlicky seafood, smelling like wet dog. After work, when I went next door for a pint with my coworkers, it was raining. And at midnight, when I took a cab home, it was STILL RAINING.

When I say “raining,” I do not mean a piddly little drizzle. I mean a full-out torrential downpour - the kind that normally, unable to sustain itself, ends after a few minutes. This was a full-out torrential downpour that lasted nearly 24 hours.

The restaurant next door to us flooded; they were out with sandbags, trying to prevent the inevitable. Our side shed was under several inches of water. The streets were alive with fire trucks, equipped with long black hoses, pumping out the roads and gutters. Everyone’s yard has become a swimming pool. The ditches are full.

I’m sitting on the couch now, typing, and I can hear the rain beating down on the roof.

Tomorrow they predict sunshine, which I find almost difficult to imagine. But work was fun, exciting. For a night, the inside of the Swiss Café became a warm and bustling refuge, inhabited by a lot of people united, if only it was just because none of us wanted to go outside.

Saturday, 2:35 pm:

Talk about serious flooding. I knew it was bad last night; the fire trucks with their hoses were sign enough of that, let alone Jamie and Lewis’s boss from the hotel spending the night on our couch because the roads back to his house in Kerikeri were blocked and flooded.

But today the roads are still closed. Paihia is full of stranded travelers who can’t drive away to Auckland. Jen, on her drive home from Mt. Doom, is trapped on the other side of a major road that is closed because it is covered in over ONE METER of water. These roads run along the beach, and there is no break between ocean and road. It’s all one big body of water today, baby. I feel like I’m witnessing, right here in Paihia, what could happen if glaciers keep melting and sea levels rise. It’s bad news.

Not to mention the ocean is a sickly yellow brown color today. Except for the jet skis dotting its surface, it looks like a big mud flat. There is no resemblance to water. Mudslides and rivers running over their banks across the region did an end to that blissfully blue water we normally enjoy.

All of that said, it’s kind of an exciting thing to experience. You know me. I love it when things get a little topsy-turvy.