Friday - January 14, 2011

crickey!

Pity the poor land down under. Australia and Tasmania have been inundated by heavy rains for weeks now. Flooding across huge parts of the nation, especially in Queensland. And the rains aren’t over yet.

In several places the flood waters have been 25 - 30 feet deep. It’s going to cost them billions to clean up when this is all over. Still, no worries. The Aussies will pitch in and get the job done. No whinging.

But here’s a wild little bit of flood news that sounds like one of their famous tall tales ...

Two bull sharks have been spotted swimming past the McDonald’s restaurant in Goodna. Goodna butcher Steve Bateman saw one of the sharks swimming through the flooded waters of Williams Street near his bucher’s shop in the St Ives shopping centre yesterday. There were several reports of another shark spotted in Queen Street, the main street through Goodna.

Bull sharks have been spotted in the Goodna sections of the Bremer BRISBANE River previously, with fishermen regularly catching them from the Goodna boat ramp.

Ipswich councillor for the Goodna region Paul Tully said while it may sound almost too bizarre to be real, the shark sighting was valid.

“It would have swam several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway,” Cr Tully said.

“It’s definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street.

Goodna was awash with water eight metres deep during the past 48 hours. The water receded dramatically overnight.

Goodna is about 20 miles southwest of Brisbane, though about 40 miles up the meandering river from that city. Brisbane is on the east coast of Australia, right above the middle of the eastward bulge of the continent.

BRISBANE, Australia, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Floods left parts of Australia’s third-biggest city on Thursday looking like a war zone in need of years of reconstruction, the state premier said, while fresh threats loomed with a cyclone forecast offshore.

The floods across the state of Queensland have killed at least 19 people, 12 of whom died in the Toowoomba area inland, and 61 were missing, the state government said.

Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley region, west of state capital Brisbane, were devastated by tsunami-like flash flooding on Monday.

Large parts of Brisbane have become muddy lakes, with an entire waterfront cafe among the debris washing down the Brisbane River, a torrent that has flooded 12,000 homes in the city of 2 million and left 118,000 buildings without power.

Aerial views of Brisbane showed a sea of brown water with rooftops poking through the surface.

“What I’m seeing looks more like a war zone in some places,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh told reporters after surveying the disaster from the air. “All I could see was their rooftops ... underneath every single one of those rooftops is a horror story.”

Floodwaters in 35 suburbs, which on Thursday peaked below disastrous levels predicted a day earlier, forced residents to take to boats to move about the streets, where traffic signs peeped above the water.

Rescue teams and victims of the flooding have already had to deal with crocodiles and snakes, with Australia’s northeast [Queensland]-- which has been battered by weeks of flooding—home to some of the world’s most dangerous species.

A series of recent ultra-high resolution photographs, in scalable map format, are available here.

And, just because, here’s a picture of Charisma Carpenter from a few years ago. And one of Karina Lombard, who still brings that exotic ferocity, even though she’s positively “ancient” (41) by Hollywood standards. I think she’s just getting warmed up.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/14/2011 at 11:58 PM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Eye-Candy • International •  
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