STORIES FROM THE STORM - The Stories

Hell and High Water
by D Harvey

This is a fairly quiet city. Since the BHP steelworks shut down and relocated its steel-making operations to the eastern seaboard of Thailand, the place has been pleasantly unpolluted in its lack of industry.
However, on Friday, 8th June 2007, a sub-tropical cyclone moved in and, with torrential rain and high winds, turned the city of Newcastle into a hellish nightmare.

My wife attends college here, and I collected her at 1 PM. I listen to a particular radio station because it has good music, hourly news bulletins, and traffic reports as situations dictate. On that day, there wasn't much music, and plenty of the other 2 types of reports. A bulk coal transport ship had either dragged its anchor(s) in the high winds and heavy seas, or the anchor line had parted. The crew was unable to get the power to the paddles in time, and the ship, the "Pasha Bulker", had run aground on the beach which lies on the outside of the southern breakwater to the harbour. From what I have seen of the lie of the ship, if it is not re-floated within a week or less, it will be very difficult to ever get off the beach. Apart from being an eyesore and the wrong sort of tourist attraction, it'll totally ruin the surfing. It does not seem to be near the swimming area, but its presence could change the flow of the currents in the swimming area, something that is not necessarily a good thing

The good news is that despite the driving rain and matching wind, the entire crew was winched to safety by rescue helicopters. Later that afternoon, another three bulk coal ships were reported to be inbound towards undesirable moorings, but two were able to fire up their motors in time, and the third was towed out to sea by a tugboat with a fearless crew.

On the way to the college, I had driven through some serious weather, including hail and snow [truly!] at the intersection of Croudace Street and Newcastle Road, and I had listened to the radio for their report of road conditions and closures. I worked out which way I was going to travel home before my wife had even got in the car, and thus we got home with no serious problems.

The car that I drive is only a modest model, I bought it second-hand. It's a nice car to drive, comfortable, has a moderate turn of power, and to quote a phrase from the movie "Pretty Woman", it "goes around corners like it's on rails"; it's perhaps the nicest car that I have ever owned, I like it a lot, and if anything bad happened to it, I would not be pleased.

My stepdaughter works in a restaurant in Charlestown on Fridays and Saturdays, and I normally drive her to and from work for a 5 PM start and a 9 PM finish. We departed Argenton in good time, and for the first 2 kilometres, things went well, and we got to Cardiff, and noted a little water on the road, which we were able to mostly skirt, and that was the point of no return; after that point, a u-turn was not possible. We approached the intersection of Macquarie and Myall roads, controlled by traffic lights, but the computer which controlled the lights seemed to have lost its brains as it was running through its normal sequence at a minimum of 5 times normal speed. At this point, my experience living in a country area rose to the surface and took control.

First, I realised that the red-light camera would not be able to identify me as my registration plates were at least 6 inches under muddy water, so it was a case of ignore the traffic signals. Second, a sedan really should not stop in water up to the wheel-arches, otherwise, it may be difficult to get it moving again, so I just kept going in the direction that the water depth dictated. There were bigger cars than mine, drowned, in both right and left cross-streets, so I had to go ahead, and up the incline which told me that I would be safe going that way. This was not the way that I wanted to go, but any other way was not possible.

Eventually, we got to the end of the high ground and descended towards the roundabout at Warner's Bay High School, which was also flooded. Left turn was not an option as there were more drowned cars there, neither was straight ahead as I recalled that the roundabout was higher than the road, and that left little else; I turned right towards Speers Point, directly away from the direction we wanted to go, and within 40 metres, we were out of that particular flood. To negotiate the water at this roundabout was, in my estimation, at the very limit of my car's capabilities, so I used a trick taught to me by my father - bless him. I ran my right wheels on the raised part of the roundabout, and assuming that the motor's air intake is roughly in the centre of the car, that gave me nearly half of the height of the roundabout's raised portion as extra height for the air intake. That might, or might not, have made the difference between continuing the journey, and not going any further.

This wrong-direction road curved around to the left, and ended at another road which followed the shoreline of Lake Macquarie where I wanted to turn left, but I needed to see through the driver door's window, and the fogging was happening so quickly that I had to lower the window to see, and be able to safely make the turn. In the few seconds the window was down, my jacket was drenched.

I made the turn into The Esplanade, and using my good knowledge of the local topography, I was able to plan a route to the step-daughter's place of employment via King Street, Bayview Street, and Warners Bay Road to the Pacific Highway. We made it to Charlestown, but traffic flow to the actual location of the restaurant was hampered by a maze of turn restrictions which were meant to enhance the flow of through traffic in normal circumstances. All of these restrictions prevented me from turning across the highway at every intersection except Dudley Road, and this single available turn put me on a road which is the wrong side of a gully which was likely to contain water.

There are several roads across this gully [all at ground level], and I checked each of them in turn. The first, accessed by turning into James Street, was blocked because fire-fighters' trucks were blocking James Street, and the rest of the roads were under water, and I wasn't going to press my luck finding out how deep the water was. I turned back towards the first crossing, the one behind the roadblock. Surprise, surprise! The road was passable. After more than an hour on the road we were there.

From the time that we had walked out the front door to commence that odyssey, the rain did not cease, and it was coming down as fast and hard as I have ever seen. The de-fogger of the car was struggling to keep the lower third of the windscreen transparent, and there was the constant tension from the fear that my car might ingest water into the air intake and drown. If that had happened, it would have been all over, red rover, and we would be out of the car, walking through water. We would have been just another two pedestrians in the rain. So to let the adrenaline subside, I took a pit-stop at the restaurant. It was just as well that I did, the restaurant owner had sent the other two kitchen workers home as he could not see any point in staying open, there were no customers coming. He apologised for not phoning either my mobile phone or the step-daughter's, but pointed out that if we looked at the reception indicator on our phones, we would see that we had no reception. Our phone supplier's network had failed.

So the young lady came home with me.

I was careful to stick to the high ground, and we only had to dodge falling trees and power lines, flying fence panels, microwave dishes, and other debris.

We arrived home and discovered that the internet was off the air.

I felt the need for a few codiene/paracetamol tablets and patiently waited for them to take effect while the girls lamented the inability to view Thai TV, a result of the heavy rain.

My wife can sometimes be very perceptive and she did not bring up the next matter until the edge of the pain had been taken off the headache. She led me into the bedroom and I saw that there were three buckets, each with a small amount of water in them. All three buckets were on our bed. The only solution for the night was to move the bed sideways against the wardrobe. I did this, also replacing the buckets under their respective drips.

TV was a washout, figuratively speaking, so I sat at the computer, hoped for the internet to come back on, and read some of a book with the radio playing low. The repeated message on the radio was that everybody who did not have genuine need to be out should stay home, off the roads. About midnight, I took a few more codiene/paracetamol tabs, and went to bed. The long weekend had started badly, I sincerely hoped that Saturday would bring an improvement, but it didn't. Not long after I had gone to bed on Friday night, the entire power grid and supply to this city failed.

Until you have been in a city with no power supply, you do not realise how utterly dependant society is upon the electricity supply. Without power, there is no light, and in any home without gas-fired appliances, there is no hot water, no ability to cook, no heating, no cordless phones, no TVs or radio, and if you have gas appliances without a pilot light, there is no spark to light the gas. My home has no gas appliances. Outside the home, there are no traffic lights at the critical intersections, no street-lights at night, the list goes on.

I had to go out on Saturday afternoon, and the drowned cars were mostly still where they had been left by their drivers. The salvage vehicles were thick on the ground, and they were doing a roaring trade, slowly working their way around the city, collecting cars as quickly as they could, and delivering them to all of the repair shops, which had mostly opened to accept all of this business bonus, not turning it away to other repairers. I returned home to a phone call from the restaurant where my wife and step-daughter were expecting to work that night; there was no power, the restaurant could not open, they should not go to work.

Power supply to my home was restored on Saturday just after noon, but was disconnected again at 5 PM while grid connections were re-established so as to permit power restoration to other areas. After 4 hours of sitting around a few candles, we all went to bed. Perhaps a little hasty, but in this day and age, watching a candle burn gets uninteresting very fast, and with my eyesight, reading by candle-light is not an option. The power was restored just after 9:30 PM, and has been with us ever since then.

I listened to the radio whenever I was in my car, and when at home, whenever there was power, and some of the bits that got broadcast were "interesting". Many homes were flooded, and many others came close to the same fate. One woman phoned the radio station with a complaint and they recorded and broadcast the call. She told all of the drivers of the big 4-wheel-drive vehicles to "F*** off, get off the road". In my view, she had a very legitimate gripe. Ordinary sedans travelling along her flooded street were wisely travelling slowly so that they did not get water into their air intakes, but the 4WDs, with their higher air intakes and snorkels did not have this restriction, and tore down the street at speed, creating bow waves which were slowly flooding this unfortunate woman's home; her floor was above the water's peak, but the bow waves from the 4WDs came in under her front door.

Another tale is that of the 6-months pregnant woman who couldn't get out of her car's window after it [her car] had drowned, and she couldn't open her doors because of the water pressure outside. She was able to use her mobile phone [different network, not the same as mine], a salvage vehicle found her car, and raised the front end out of the water so that she could open the door and get out.

And there is the tale of my ex-partner who had collected our boy for a weekend contact visit on Friday afternoon, took him to her home and left him there [there were other suitable adults there to supervise him], then went to go to work, and drowned her car on the way. She had told the boy to wait up for her, but she was unable to return home until mid-morning on Saturday. I got to take the boy home later that day. Her house was without power, so no heating.

From memory, the death toll is 9 people drowned in flood waters, and another 5 [an entire family] killed when the road under their car collapsed. The insurance claims lodged on the first working day after the weekend were in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars. My roof and ceiling might be one of the claims lodged in the next few days, but that's the landlord's worry.

My car definitely needs a visit to the mechanic's shop, it is showing signs of having got very wet. The door hinges and handles creak and stick, the throttle cable sticks, indicating either foreign matter [mud] or rust in the cable, it runs a bit rough, so perhaps there is moisture in the electrics. My mechanic is good, he can sort out any problems, and then my car will be back to normal.

Relatively speaking, I got off lightly. I was out in the flooding on Friday night, in the way of serious harm, and all that happened was that I need to have various bits of the car oiled. It could have been much worse. My power supply was only broken for a total of about 16 hours, a large portion of that being sleeping time which didn't worry me; there are houses which are still without power, and the repair teams say that there are some who will not get their power supply restored until next week.

Six days after the event, I am still thanking my lucky stars.

Storm Stories index Page...