Heavy rain and flooding have caused serious damage to nurseries in Queensland, Australia’s heartland when it comes to tropical plant growing. Our correspondent Anthony Tesselaar reports from Down Under.Giving a quick update of the current situation Tesselaar states that Australia has gone from a drought country to a flooded country. Tesselaar himself lives in Silvan 50 Kms east of Melbourne and 1,500 to 3,000 km away from the devastated areas in Queensland and northern New South Wales. The area under flood is equivalent to Germany and France together.
“One town almost had what looked like an inland Tsunami going through it. At the end the town looked like as if a tornado had ripped it apart. Wednesday night January 12th, floods hit Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, with the river rising 4.5m. So downtown, water everywhere, and around 12,000 houses flooded in the city suburb areas there too, and 2,500 business submerged, and another of the same amount partially flooded. In Ipswich, a major country town of 155,000 further north, they had a river flood peak at 19m! Those people who live on higher grounds are OK, those that built in the valley find themselves in a difficult situation.”
Most of the area flooded throughout Queensland and North South Wales is farm land. However, over 27 major country towns are flooded, or evacuated. “All this is causing many councils to now start rethinking about allowing buildings on flood or low levels plants. But of course people like to build by the rivers for the scenic views and I think the 100 year floods are not going to be in their lifetime.”
In the meantime it is expected that the weather will dry out a little and 3 to 7 days are needed for the water to dissipate to normal very high flood levels in all the river systems. ”And to think Queensland has not had it normal monsoon time yet!”
On the plant nursery side, Queensland is where most of the tropical plants are grown in Australia, and of course many of the nurseries are often located on low lying land.
“At nurseries that were in the way of these water “tides” coming through, there were no plants left at all of course. They were all swept away in the water deluge. Other nurseries are caught up in the flood as they cannot send plants out nor receive plugs. The question is how quick the industry can get back on line once the waters recede?”
From his homeland Victoria, Tesselaar reports “a good, wet summer which is really nice for all the plants after 13 years of drought. “Some of the Victorian northern country areas have had some floods through them as we are getting some of the tropical clouds from up north. (last night it was still 24 deg at midnight) Some areas of northern Victoria have had their monthly averages in one day. They are still talking though that Victoria looks like getting some sporadic heavy rainfalls coming from these major shift weather patterns, and so we will also continue to see more flooding here as well in various low lying areas. Anyway, we start off with an interesting year. What was not very nice, some of the people that lost their houses in the bushfires last year, ended up have their new houses inundated from these floods.”
Perth in Western Australia , over 1,500 miles to the west Tesselaar’s home, is now going through a major drought. “The weather pattern has changed. Perth was hit by huge bushfires while the floods were raging in Queensland. Yes, we are living in interesting times.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment