Queensland floods! My advice!

It seems callous to talk about a holiday in NZ when so many friends are staring down the barrel of a gun. Actually not so much a gun as the floodwaters currently making their way down Brisbane River, expected to hit the city tomorrow.

The beautiful Loredana, known to you through this blog, is among those expected to be affected. She says she's saving the photo albums but, as far as she's concerned, the rest can go, although I suspect she is rethinking this as we speak!  The waiting must be horrible if only because it gives you so much time to think about other things that mean a lot to you and which you realise you MUST save.

That old lady packing up her grandfather clock and wondering where she can store it for the duration!  Did you see that on yesterday's news?

And I had to laugh at Premier Anna Bligh's comment "I want everyone to go around to visit your elderly neighbours to see if they're OK?" because ... well, since these floods are expected to reach and even exceed the heights of the devastating 1974 Brisbane floods, and the website with the 1974 flood map crashed because of the sheer numbers of visitors, everyone I know is going around to visit their elderly neighbours to ask "Am I going to be OK?"

Australia is always wonderful in a crisis!  I guess they've had a lot of practise for surviving disasters PLUS they've also got that wonderful John O'Brien poem "We'll all be rooned, said Hanrahan!" to keep everything in perspective.

Do you know that poem?  If you don't - HERE - and do read it because I think this quintessential piece of Australiana is the secret to that wonderfully careless heroism Australians bring to situations like these.

Me, I know floods.  When we lived in Townsville, we had 13 of them in less than three years. This was mainly due to Cyclone Justin, the largest cyclone the world has ever seen, which was so big it couldn't move - and a cyclone needs to move if it is to blow itself out - so it hung around for a month and the devastating torrential rains soaked the ground so deeply that we flooded over and over and over, for the next three years, each one worse than the last ...
 
... and so we all well learned the lessons ... the main one being ... keep your photo albums high and dry ... and the big one ... PROTECT YOUR SOFT FURNISHINGS!!!

Floodwater isn't like regular water and if any gets into your mattresses or sofa or carpet or linen closet there is no saving anything.  Within days, no matter how much you scrub and bleach, the stench becomes unbearable and that putrid rotting smell permeates everything and so many of your possessions, including books, must get tossed.

The other thing worth noting is that being in a flood can be rather fun provided you don't have to drive anywhere ... and make sure you don't drive anywhere because you WILL break down and you WILL have to wade or even swim to get to safety and, in Australia, there are always frightened snakes in that water ... and then your car, if it's been under, even if it still works, when you finally rescue it, it too will stink unbearably and will also have to be tossed.

And there are two really fascinating facts I learned because of these floods:  1) that water actually bends.  There's a viscous substance on the surface of water that holds it back from attaining its true level, and frequently flood waters can be even a foot higher than your front door but doesn't enter your house because of this frequently very large bend.  (And don't ever poke it, no matter how tempting, because if you break the surface tension, VOILA!!! You're under!)

2) that the earth appears to have a memory all of its own.  When we were digging the fishponds in our Townsville garden, we discovered that most of our garden had very little topsoil and that beneath the ground were large sacks full of rubble.  I asked our neighbour Old Kevin about it and he said our suburb once had a stream running through it but the property developer, just after WWI, diverted it and filled in the old stream bed with whatever he could.

Well, here's something so worth knowing: when you divert and fill the former creekbed, during a flood, the stream begins to run again. Seriously!  In the still flood waters, above where the stream once ran, the water races along at a very fast pace still following its old path, even if that path is right through the middle of your house.

Fun facts, right?

However, less fun is the fact that, while your floods are very newsworthy and you get lots of sympathy, the real horror begins AFTER it's over.  First, the mosquitoes arrive in swarms, then everyone you know, including yourself, comes down with Dengue and Ross River Virus and Barhma-Forrest. And then, during the clean-up, other nasty insects come into play and those folk who escaped the first round, and even those who didn't, like our poor darling Keith, come down with other nasties like Q Fever or tick paralysis or Lyme Disease.

But, right when you start to feel like you're trapped in some Old Testament bible-story, Mother Nature confirms it because along comes the truest of the fearful post-flood monsters: the hideous disease of meliadosis. I may have spelt this wrongly, because I can't find a reference to it anywhere, but nonetheless this is something you MUST take into account when you're cleaning up after a flood.

This hideous disease is caused by bacteria normally only found deep within the earth, but floods bring them to the surface and with your topsoil full of these vicious little things, even the tiniest scratch can kill you! 

Dozens of friends came down with this disease during our three years of flooding.  Most of them died. And someone I knew well, David, a professional gardener with a beautiful wife and three gorgeous little children, so with a lot to live for, got it six times and heroically fought it off five times, "The hardest thing I've ever done!" he told me - however, during his sixth bout, said "No more.  I have no fight left. This time I go."  and he died almost immediately.

This is a hideous disease, although the world mostly ignores it despite it killing over 13 million Africans every year.  But the really horrible part is that those friends who heroically fought the disease and survived were all left with the most curious coloured skin.  They were all kinda purple-ish-reddish and it was extremely freakish-looking, and it lasted for years afterwards too.  That was such a tragedy and I felt deeply for them; all these people who'd gone through life looking normal suddenly had to learn to cope with people staring at them, and teenagers laughing at them, and children running away screaming.

Of these dozens, the lucky ones began to fade after three or so years, but others were still purple after five, but those folk weren't seen in public anymore because they were all too ashamed.  People can be very cruel.  Even me!  I used to look at them and think "I think I'd have preferred to die!"

I was lucky, I suspect, because I too was a serious gardener, however, because I came down with Ross River Virus early, with the usual crippling poly-arthritis and hands too twisted and painful to do anything at all, I escaped this particular horror!

So that's my advice regarding flooding and I hope you take away something from it, even if it's just PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO DO YOUR CLEAN-UP!!!