Month: April 2019

Resuming Green Path

The last six months have been full of house renovations and a move – still in Mundingburra, still between Ross River Road and the river, but the garden is quite different and I foresee a number of blog posts about the difference the vegetation makes to the small wildlife.

Other than that, it will be business as usual for the blog although there may be more emphasis on climate change because the outlook has been going from bad to worse, even as the technology to ameliorate the situation has been improving. All is not lost, but time is running out.

My first post after the interregnum, Townsville’s 2019 floods, connects with many environmental issues and I expect to take them up in more detail during the next few months, but I also have a backlog of wildlife and wilderness stories to share.

 

Townsville’s 2019 floods

The Townsville flood of January-February 2019 was, like cyclones Althea and Yasi, one of the extreme weather events which define people’s lives in the city. Two months later, “How did you go in the floods?” is still the first question we ask friends we haven’t seen for a while. There’s a lot for Green Path to say about it but whatever we publish now will be incomplete so we will update and extend it as appropriate, in separate posts if justified by the amount of extra material.

Let’s begin with an overview of the weather event and its immediate consequences.

The weather event

A low in the monsoon trough over the Gulf became a rain depression and drifted South and East until it settled over Townsville, where it stayed much longer than “normal” (we will have to return to that concept later) and dumped an inordinate amount of rain on us over about ten days – say 29-30 Jan to 7-8 Feb.  Continue reading “Townsville’s 2019 floods”