Floods
Today it rained very heavily, on top of the large amount of rain we've already gotten this season that has filled the lakes and ponds and saturated the ground. My housemate Trent called me at 16:12 this afternoon, he was trying to get out of Birregurra, the village we live in. As he described it two of three roads out of town were already closed due to flooding. He had packed up some stuff and was trying to get out of town on the last remaining road out. "Water is lapping at the sides of the road mate and it looks like it will be over this road soon as well. What are you going to do?"
"Well, when I get off work I'll get in there if I possibly can" I replied. As it happens, further along that road it was flooded and he was turned around, unable to escape Birregurra. Shortly thereafter I got several notifications from the fire brigade app that they were having a call out to make sand bags.
As the end of the workday approached I looked at the road closures map:
I would be coming from the east, the right side of the above map. It looks like all three main roads were closed. BUT one will note coming from that middle road from the east (the "Cape Otway Highway") there's only a small closed segment which might just be them painting a road closure further down that connecting road with an overly broad brush. OR worst case scenario I could go past Birregurra on the M1 to the larger town of Colac, and circle around to come up the C119 (rough diagram).
As I left work I texted some people in town to ask them if they knew if any roads were still accessible. Family friend Lyn Downard called me back to say her daughter Sara had just successfully entered town from Cape Otway Highway way. So I headed up that way.
It's about a forty minute drive up that road, which is my usual route. On this occasion there was water over the road in several places, which was intimidating because I just have the revenant honda civic the USS Trilobite, but as I saw other sedan cars coming my way (though traffic was very very light) which must have crossed through these, I was relatively confident that I'd make it and did. When I got to the area just outside of Birregurra that was listed as closed it was fortunately still open.
I proceeded directly to the fire station which was in an eerily unusual condition of having all the lights on and doors open, and the fire trucks moved outside, but no one there. Fortunately another volunteer was arriving at the same time I did. I was about to call the captain and he said he'd already tried and got no answer, but he believed they were at the footy oval. So we got into our firefighting gear and proceeded across Birre to the footy ground, where sure enough we found some emergency vehicles with their red and blue flashing lights, and a bunch of SES (professional emergency services) folks in their sherbet-orange uniforms busily scooping sand from a freshly dumped pile into sandbags. We got right in with them making sandbags, which were loaded onto pickups and taken to where the rest of the brigade were using them to protect houses in a lower part of town.
And then around 19:40 we were told they thought they had enough sandbags and we'd all stand down until further notice. I got the impression the SES folks were just going to redeploy immediately to another flooding emergency.
Presently it is 23:20 and those roads are still closed. I think we expect the main river that flows through town and is causing the flooding, the Barwon, to continue rising overnight as water from upstream comes down, so things could potentially get worse by morning. I'm not terribly concerned about my own or house's safety though, I'm only at kind of the base of the hill but thats enough that I'm not in a low lying flood prone area. Might not be able to go to work in the morning though.
