Our Beautiful World - Rain

This week at Our Beautiful World the prompt is RAIN and I'm thinking to myself...how am I going to get a photo of rain when low and behold just yesterday we got a few showers so I was able to snap a quick pic on my way home from work. I know it's not really a great photo but it leads into my ramblings about rain and where I live. Even though I live in tropical Queensland Australia, my city is actually sub tropical and we actually live in a rain shadow, meaning we don't get a lot of rain...but when we do get rain it really rains!! This is our front yard just 2 weeks ago. We had so much rain, it rained for nearly 2 days straight that parts of our city was flooding.

Our front yard never used to flood like this but a couple of years ago, the local council dug up our footpaths to do some pipe maintenance and when they filled it all in again they obviously never made the ground 'fall' properly. As we live on acreage, we don't have gutters & drains, we only have large easements where the excess water is supposed to run into.

Now, it doesn't run off  like it should and it backs up and floods our front yard. We have been in this house for 11 years and it has happened twice now (after big rains and since they dug up the footpath) that the water comes up onto our front patio, it had never done this before. Luckily, for us, it will never come into our house and once it stops raining it doesn't take long for the water to disappear.

If the monsoon doesn't come down low enough to give us our annual rain we then rely on cyclones. The rain in the above photos came from a small cyclone that crossed the coast below our city.  If a cyclone crosses over your city or above your city (on the map) you will get rain. If it crosses below your city, you won't but this time, it was actually looking like hitting our city until the very last minute where it swung down and hit Bowen so we actually benefited by getting a rain out of it. Cyclones are very unpredictable and twist and turn so you never really know where it's going to hit.

 3 years ago we were hit by the largest cyclone in our recorded history (I think...). Cyclone Yasi actually crossed the coast approximately 150 kms north of us. It crossed the coast right over the small township of Cardwell. My mother & stepfather actually live in Cardwell. The small town was evacuated, something I have never heard of happening before, because it was such a large cyclone. They actually came down to us to ride the cyclone out. Our house is approx 20 kms from the coast and 150 kms south of  where the cyclone crossed but as you can see from the pictures it still caused extensive damage around our yard. Luckily there was no structural damage to our house and even more miraculously no real damage to my mothers house.

We are lucky to have a great family who came and helped us clean up our yard which took days and it was a couple of weeks before the highway was open and the residents of Cardwell were able to return to their homes. The reconstruction of Cardwell's main street was only just completed late last year as it was so extensive but it looks amazing now. As I write this post, we are watching a low off the east coast of Australia which they think will form into a cyclone later this week. Needless to say we don't really want a cyclone but the majority of Queensland is in drought at the moment and our dam, the city's water supply, is under 50% capacity, so if that is what it takes to get rain....we'll take it.

Well, thanks for reading my ramblings, I hope it was interesting for you as I find event from other nations and their way of life very interesting and.....bring on the rain!!!