The power is still out

in some areas - and may still not be back on until tomorrow at the earliest. 

We have been fortunate here, very fortunate. The weather on Saturday was the worst I can remember in years. We had 49mm of rain in twenty four hours in this suburb. People living in this short street are just thankful we are high enough and far enough away from the creek not to have experienced flooding. Indeed the new flood mitigation measures seem to have done the job. There is water lying around but it is not deep enough for concern.

There were high winds too, not the sort of winds you experience in a cyclone but still strong enough to do considerable damage. Friends who live up in the hills behind me had a tree fall on their carport and will now be seeking a replacement for their car. When I saw J... in the post office this morning she just said, "At least it didn't fall on the house".  She still looked shaken.

Other people had to be rescued from rising water. The Country Fire Service site was a mass of red "ongoing" incidents. The State Emergency Service was trying to work in the most appalling conditions. 

Middle Cat took me to the shopping centre yesterday. Riding the trike through the water lying around is not safe and my little vehicle also needs attention - a trip to "bike hospital" will occur when the technician goes in on Wednesday. But yesterday Middle Cat and I parked in the underground carpark area. There was still rather a lot of water on the ground.

It would have been a good idea to wash the windows here. I could have left the rain, which was coming in horizontally, to wash the suds off. I left the windows shut and abandoned all attempts to go on with clearing out a small shed. (It's a miserable task anyway. All the things in it belonged to the Senior Cat. I hate giving away his magic apparatus, his conjuring books, his gardening and woodwork books. There are piles of novels to go through - but most of them will go to his church or the street libraries which have sprung up around the district. That's what he would have wanted.)

In all this though I am thinking about the power. As I said we did not lose power here despite the fact that lightning hit the roof at least once and there were seemingly endless strikes all over the street. It was not safe to leave the house. The lights flickered almost constantly but the power stayed on. 

That it did not in other areas and is taking so long to be restored is surely a wake up call. Our much praised "big battery" was flattened in less than two hours. Yesterday people were being asked to turn off the links that feed solar power into the grid because it was sunny for a while. Apparently we can't actually harness and use all that power just some of it. We can't store it.

It all seems very strange to me - and it concerns me. We have a long way to go before we get this "renewable" thing right - if we ever do.I need to be thankful though - that I do not live in Ukraine where they are going into winter without power.