After the rain

In this episode, we explore what happens when the reality of climate-change starts to become personal…

Earlier in the year, it hit the state just north of us, time after time. This week, it was our turn.

Floods.

Serious floods.

In some places, the worst floods for more than half a century. Even worse, actually.

And by the look of the weather-forecast, there’s a real chance now that it’ll happen all over again as soon as next week.

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When I left Australia almost two decades ago, we’d had the opposite problem, of year-long drought. The reservoir just down the hill from where I lived back then was so low that they couldn’t get any water out of it from the usual outlets: they had to float a diesel pump on a small pontoon out in the middle of what little was left, to get any water out of it at all.

But now we’re back in the wet again: too much water. Much too much water.

Okay, there’s a well-known weather-pattern across the whole of the Pacific, called the El Niño / La Niña cycle. (Literally ‘the Boy’ and ‘the Girl’, if you’re interested.) At any given time, one side of the Pacific has the El Niño part of the pattern, whilst the other side gets the La Niña. If you’re on the El Niño side, you get drought; if you’re on the La Niña side, you get rain. And they used to swap over roughly every other year or so, so it all balanced out all round, and everyone got the right amount of sunshine and rain that they needed.

But over the past few decades, the pattern seems to be developing an increasing tendency to get stuck: it doesn’t swap over in the regular way that it used to do. So California has been trapped in relentless drought, year after year, whilst over on this side it’s just rain after rain after rain.

After a while of that, it just becomes too much.

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It’s been raining here all through the winter - much more so than the previous year. The grass has been growing like crazy - again, even right through the winter, which I’ve never seen here before. We may have a few sunny days together, enough to dry things out enough to get some urgent mowing done - but then it’s back to the rain again. And again. The soil in the garden has become spongy, unstable: it can’t hold any more water.

Which is why, with this week’s rain, it didn’t.

So it went straight into the rivers instead.

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We’d been warned it was coming, though it didn’t look like much at first. A day of mildish not-quite non-stop rain, shower after shower after shower. Not all that much rain overall, though: a couple of millimetres, maybe as much as five or so. That’s a bit less than a quarter of an inch. It’s not a lot: enough to mess up your wedding-day, perhaps, but otherwise nothing much to be crying about.

The next day, it really was non-stop wet. Not particularly heavy rain as such, most of the time, but because it was non-stop, it added up fast: ten millimetres, maybe twenty overall. For here, that’s a lot of rain: almost half a month’s worth in a single day.

It was still raining non-stop the following morning, when I had to go down town to buy some stationery, so I stopped to take a look at the big river-drain that runs through the middle of town. It’s huge, and deep, but usually it’s almost completely empty: no more than a tiny trickle dribbling along the little culvert at the bottom. The highest level I’d seen there before was just above the level of the culvert, a foot deep at most, and no more than a couple of feet wide. This time, though, it was, uh, a bit different:

Ten feet higher at least. And that was before the main rains hit in the afternoon…

Not just non-stop: heavy non-stop. Some of it at millimetre-a-minute or more - the kind of levels people would see way up in the tropics, not down here two thousand a miles away. Where I live, it added up to around a hundred millimetres over the day, or about four inches: more than two months’-worth of rain in a single day. Elsewhere it was even worse - almost twice as much, in one town somewhat further south.

And all of that water, the soil couldn’t take on any more: it was already overloaded from all those weeks of previous rain. So the only place it could go was straight into the rivers - which, as you can see above, were already almost at their limit.

On the two main rivers round here, the peak was at ten metres above normal on one, more than twelve on the other. That’s more than forty feet. And that peak takes at least a couple of days to move downstream to the mighty Murray River, itself already overfull, which then takes another two to three weeks to get to the outflow at the coast, a full five hundred miles away.

Flood.

Lots of flood. Spreading sideways, sometimes for miles on that flat landscape, whenever there’s too much water to be contained within the river’s banks. Those areas are called ‘floodplains’ for a reason: they’re not wise places for people to build houses on…

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Right now the rain has eased off somewhat. For a while, at least. We have warmer weather, with mostly sunshine expected for the next few days. And I’ll admit that right where I live has been almost unaffected for the most part: the house is right up at the top of a ridge, though everything around it is soaked, and the water is still draining out along the driveway two days later. But on the other side of town, it’s floods everywhere. My friend runs a farm about thirty miles to the south: he was already repairing serious flood-damage there before the main rains came, and I haven’t heard from him since. Not good…

Not good for so many others too. So far thousands of people already evacuated to higher ground, the largest evacuation in the history of the state; hundreds of homes and businesses already damaged or destroyed, with thousands more expected before this is all done. The main road to the north from here has been wrecked in several places, all the blacktop ripped off by the floodwaters: that alone will take weeks to repair, whilst repairing the damage to the towns themselves will be more like measured in years. And no-one can make a start on any of that until the waters go down - but the rivers are still so full that they may not subside back to sane levels for several weeks.

Or maybe even longer. It’s sort-of sunny right now, but the weather-forecast is showing another downfall of maybe another hundred millimetres or more that’s due to come through by the end of this week. And then the same pattern again, and again, for the next few months at least.

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Climate change is real. I can see that myself right now, literally just down the road from here.

A warming world isn’t just one that’s getting hotter: in this case it’s getting a whole lot wetter as well. Out here, a time that is after the rain may soon become a lot less common than we’d like…

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