This was not the shot that I originally had slated for this weekend, but upon reflection (and posting this a week afterwards) I considered it to be a substantially more relevant one. I wasn't happy with the shots that I had done that morning and did a macro in the afternoon; specifically it was of a candle which was also relevant, I suppose, also upon reflection.
What you are seeing here is part of a rain band that stretched the entire way down the east coast of Australia. For two solid days it barely stopped raining with a substantial dose of wind thrown into the bargain. On the Saturday it was merely "a good day to be indoors". But by the Sunday the rain, wind and huge tides had started to take a toll. On the northern beaches of Sydney some houses that were built along the waterfront literally collapsed into the ocean. One of the signature images was that of an expensive outdoor pool that had collapsed onto the beach that it looked over. The beaches themselves had in some cases disappeared with the waterline pushing inland by up to 50 m.
Down our way, things were less extreme in terms of damage, though we have quite a few retaining walls along the coast that are in need of repair. However we didn't escape entirely unscathed. More precisely, we didn't escape entirely unscathed. At around 10 AM on Sunday morning, there was a loud BANG that I couldn't pick up the source of but which was subsequently found to be a tree crashing onto a power box a street or two away. The computer immediately ceased functioning as did every other electronic and electrical appliance in the house which wasn't running on battery. Within a few minutes the Endeavour Energy app on my phone showed 42 streets in my area without power. We decided to go out for lunch to central Wollongong. By the time we were done it was down to about 11 streets – including ours, obviously.
By 6 PM I could see the Endeavour Energy guys in the street working on the power lines. I could see lights starting to come on in some of the other houses. But then at about 6: 30 they took off like a bat out of hell leaving us in the dark. Again, literally. Three attempts to call their support line had me on hold for nine minutes each well recorded voice told me how important my call was to them. At the nine minute mark they declared that the call centre had an emergency condition and could not answer any calls, goodbye!
About that time we spoke to the neighbours next door (where we couldn't see any lights on either) but they assured us that yes, their electricity had been reconnected. It was just us. So we went to the power box to see whether we just needed to reset the fuses and found a waterlogged cardboard card, left there four hours earlier (you know, before when we could have done something about it) telling us that the outage caused a power surge which blew out three of our four fuses and that we would need to have an electrician check all of the wiring and appliances before switching them back on. There was red tape over where our fuses once stood. It also mentioned that there may be some damage to some of our appliances. Oh, and that none of this was their fault. It went to great pains to belabour that last point.
Some damage; yeah. It blew out the microwave, knocked out the ignition system in the oven and griller, knocked over two out of the three ceiling fans and the lights contained therein, and blew out one power board. (I'm paranoid about having almost everything hooked into a surge protecting power board. Unfortunately, I didn't think about the microwave. And there is nothing I could have done about the oven or the ceiling fans in that respect.)
Fortunately most of this is now covered by insurance, but in the meantime we still have no oven or griller. Fortunately the cooktop survived.
Anyway, that's just our experience of this particular climatic event. Clearly other people had even worse experiences of it.
