Rain

It's raining, it's pouring .......... and it's really dark because of the cloud cover. I can't speak for the rest of the country but Tregear is no where near a drought. With this much rain I'd be wondering about the creek flooding again! I heard an interesting bit of trivia on Time Team last night - they were talking about a heavy clay area they were working on and described it as being created milimetre by milimetre each time the area flooded. It's created by very fine particles floating in the water being laid down... and we have so much clay around here it makes me wonder just how bad the floods from Ropes Creek have been in times past. The creek has flooded since I've lived here, I've seen Tregear Reserve covered in water, my neighbor has seen the reserve fill with water up to the edge of the road. Each time it rains like this I find myself wondering if it's going to go again. The two main ways out of Tregear are across the creek, on Forrester and Debrincat. Both those bridges are about the same height and so they both go under about the same time. There's now a new bridge, in Ropes Crossing. It seems higher, but the next flood will tell us. The rain radar is interesting - http://mirror.bom.gov.au/products/IDR033.shtml , shows the rain covering the whole of Sydney this morning. Have a fun day...

And there was hail the day before yesterday. Very small and it didn't last long but it made a racket.

Flooding

There's been so much rain that various streams have flooded around the area. Ropes creek hasn't yet. It's up quite a lot, but not close enough to flooding. I have seen it flood, a couple of times a few years ago, and the worst was when the whole reserve was flooded. It filled up to the bottom of the embankment along Ellsworth Drive. Both bridges, the one on Forester and the one on Debrincat were covered and there was no way from Tregear into St Marys. We had to go round via Mt Druitt or up to Penrith. Luckily the buses come and go from Mt Druitt so we could still get around without much trouble.

On the way home from the station today we drove around to have a look at flooded South Creek at St Marys and found all the fuss on Werrington Road with the possibility of missing children. There were helicopters everywhere and a motor boat on an area that is usually dry, running beside the road on the north side of Dunheved Road. Fire engines everywhere and heaps of onlookers. The whole of South Creek has turned into a lake.

Of course none of that was in Tregear ... hmm. In Tregear there was a dirt bike in the reserve, although under these weather conditions we might have to call it a mud bike...