Last Sunday (the 6th), supposed to be a day of rest, saw but we saw the worst day in our time here at Roselea with 8 hour period of rain, rain and more rain falling upon us, starting from about 8am and finishing about 4pm!
59.1mm
Yes, that is the amount of water that indeed landed on us! Which produced a catalogue of “hair pulling” moments!
It all started fairly mundane which the rain falling steadily, not so heavily at a rate of about 8mm per hour, until lunch time. We had about 18mm of rain by then. the first blast that hit us dumped rain on us at a rate of 36mm per hour but only for about 10 minutes, adding another 6mm in that short time. We were surviving up to that point, our defences were holding and there were no signs of rainwater from our surrounding neighbours who had improved their drainage in the last few years. We just had a little pond forming on our driveway with much of the water out on the Loke.
The-first-defence-falls
Only-a-small-amount-of-water-so-far
But ..
Only an hour later during our lunch break (we had to abandon our preparations!!) the real downpour arrived! Just before this point, the rain gauge was reporting 30mm and in the next 45 minutes, it jumped up to 50mm!
This is when all defences were breached and water then turned into rivers and gushed from all directions and our small ponds became lakes and seas ..
Driveway-Flooded-to-150mm-deep
Water-surrounding-the-garage
Our swimming lane which was empty is suddenly full, a metre deep, 1.2 metres wide and 20 metres long, completely full of water! This was because the neighbouring workshop and garage saw their own rain soak-away module be swamped and all the surface water rushed towards and into our garden! We estimated about 20,000 litres arrived that way plus also a fair amount came from the grassy slopes of the neighbouring properties, so much so that our sandy soil became boggy!!
Swimming-lane-filling-with-flood-waters-from-the-neighbors
Swimming-lane-full
We had so much on our driveway where our Loke collected tons of water and dumped it on us too. We calculated another 20,000 litres came in that way too, it flooded our garden shed, it just missed flowing into our main house (just a tiny trickle) and got to within an inch of our garage floor level.
We also had rising water back filling one of our large diameter conduit in the back of the garage and got about 2 inches of water under our raised flooring but we think it didn’t go any higher because the water started pouring down the earth tubes which were buried in the concrete floor and the lips of the tubes were about an inch above this level.
Water-coming-up-through-large-duct-on-the-front-right
Garage-all-wet
But the driveway got so deep that it managed to get into our front door, up the hallway and got into our store room.
The-flooded-loke-and-driveway-from-above
So on our day of rest, we bent down to the task of mopping up the wet stuff, sweeping the water out of the garage, pumping the lake over to the school field and the ditch on their side, and pumping out the flood in our hall way and store room.
What a day we had!
Nearly 60mm of rain in 8 hours which is only 7.5mm per hour but then when one gets hit with a 48mm per hour rain rate, for only 15 minutes, nothing can cope with that!!
We have switched on our heating systems to give us some warmth and start the drying out process. Tomorrow, we will continue inspecting our home and see what state our store room is in etc.
Oh boy!
The one good spark in all this gloom was that our new main house didn’t suffer anything, no floods, no leaks and once we have our proper doorways fitted then nothing will get in! Hurray!
All this flooding meant that the following week was spent recovering from this flood. We half emptied the store room of all the boxes and furniture to assess damage, dry things out and repack several dozen boxes. Everything is almost back in the store room now. The garage is tidied up and dried out too and the space under the back room floor had dried as best as it can do on its own but we will have to do a proper review of our garage when we have moved in properly into our new home. We even managed to do a day of slating!