Monday, March 9, 2009

TC Hamish still off Qld coast (Update)


It appears that TC Hamish is travelling south-east, very slowly. It is not expected to make land fall, which is a good thing. It's still a Category 4 cyclone.

The biggest problem with Hamish will be the combination of king tides and storm surge. It's a bit confusing, however I think the storm surge will be 4 metres and king tides 2 metres.

Here is a link to some photographs from Magnetic Island, which is off Townsville (a pretty place, I was there back in 1989).

news.com.au Hamish photo gallery. (No. 9 is not bad)
Update:
TC Hamish is losing strength.
I'ts started to "mizzle" in Brisbane and it's humid. Uncomfortably so.

9 comments:

Skeeter said...

Plenty of motion in the banana leaves outside my study window.

1600 winds:
Southport — E at 48 km/hr
Cape Moreton — ESE at 65 km/hr.
We might be in for a noisy night.

Kaboom said...

Kae, if you are concerned about Hamish, a lot of us born-and-bred Brisbane people remember Wanda in 1974, following exactly the same path, although with less potential strength than Hamish presently.

Wanda just slowly meandered down the coast, about 250 Km offshore, and came through south of Maryborough as a very, very minor cyclone, and was immediately categorised as a "strong rain depression".

As a "strong rain depression", it caused the 1974 floods in Brisbane, which are still talked about in awe today amongst us old-timers.

Hamish is much more powerful as a cyclone, or as a "rain depression", than Wanda ever was. It still remains as powerful as Katrina.

I would love to see every single fucking dam in SEQ fill up, and send the sewerage recycling plants and the desalination plants into mothballs, but that is an expensive pipe-dream.

Expensive, insofar as the loss of life and property in an equivalent flood event is going to be appalling. Why don't we have effective flood mitigation (through dams) in place, in order to protect people and property.

I know! Those Green arseholes!

kae said...

Kaboom
I'm not in the slightest concerned about Hamish.
I think it's interesting, I grew up in Sydney, no cyclones there, and I wasn't in Qld in 74.
Although I am interested in what will happen when it turns into a tropical rain depression and where the rain will fall - I remember excellent rain in central Australia a few years ago when a cyclone which petered out near Broome I think crossed Australia bringing a lot of drought relieving rain.

kae said...

Oh, and it can still flood because not all the rain falls within the dam catchments.

Kaboom said...

My Oath it can still flood!

It will go for the trailer-park trash like any decent tornado.

Did you know that the Wivenhoe dam was built not for future water supply, but for flood mitigation only?

Did you know that after building Wivenhoe, they decided that a 1 in 100 flood level on the gates was insufficient, and rebuilt the gates to a 1:1,000 flood level in 2002 from memory.

Even though a 1:100 to a 1:1,000 mitigation level is very small, they decided not to build coffer dams around the works - rather, they decided to empty the dam.

2002. Empty the dam. It has not since recovered from the imposed 25% capacity after the 1:1,000 year flood mitigation works.

It could not recover during the good years, and could not recover during the drought.

Maybe it will now! Come on, Hamish!

kae said...

I'm hoping that we'll get a drenching from the decayed TC Hamish.... in the catchments which need it.

C'mon down, Hamish!

Kaboom said...

Kae, you should research the history of your local water-feature (i.e. Wivenhoe Dam)!

The difference between a 1:100 year flood level, and a 1:1,000 year flood level, is usually bugger-all, a matter of a few cm, and usually not more than a metre!

Cheers, Kaboom.

Skeeter said...

Interesting stuff, Kaboom.
In 1974, friends had just built a house on the banks of a klong behind Broadbeach. They had chosen a block that was above all previously recorded flood levels. They were standing on their back lawn watching the canal creep up the bank, when the water came into the house from the street.
Gold Coast has had a few flood frights lately and the current extensions to the Hinze Dam are designed to give protection from a 1:1000 flood.
They may have left it too late. Since starting the project, work in the slipway area has been interrupted 4 times by water going over the top of the existing slipway. It's over the top at the moment and the dam will offer no mitigation from Hamish.

kae said...

Kaboom, now you're being silly.

You know that the 1:1,000 flood won't happen because of AGW. And the AGW drought.

(As opposed to droughts prior to the invention of AGW, which were natural occurrences.)