What a difference a week makes: pictures show fire and flood
What a difference a week makes: Incredible before and after pictures show fire-ravaged bushland now underwater after torrential rain
- Social media users post stunning pictures of their land burning – then flooding
- Ironic moment a roadside LED sign warning of bushfires is submerged by floods
- ‘I was praying the rains would come and put the fires out. I may have overdone it’
- Blue Mountains: from fire falls to raging torrential waterfalls
- Mid-north coast: blackened ground goes underwater but banana trees survive
- South Coast: a flood put out a fire that was burning since November
New South Wales has been delivered from fires straight into floods after heavy rains drenched the state over the past two days.
Startling before and after pictures taken by NSW south coast resident Kellie Smith show the bushland behind her house being torched and then flooded.
‘What a difference four weeks makes,’ tweeted journalist Libby-Jane Charleston along with the stunning side-by-side photographs.
Bushland behind the home of Kellie Smith being first torched and then flooded
From fires to floods and nothing in between: Kellie Smith’s home on the NSW south coast
My Country
Many on social media brought up the famous second stanza of Dorothea Mackellar’s classic Australian poem ‘My Country’ first published in 1908:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
The Currowan fire in the Shoalhaven region of the NSW south coast had been burning for two-and-a-half months since lightening sparked it off on November 26 last year.
But the fire that destroyed 312 homes and burnt out 499,621 hectares of bushland could not withstand Saturday’s downpour, with the NSW Rural Fire Service joyously tweeting the good news on Saturday night.
Stunning pictures of a fire-fall in the Blue Mountains taken on December 22 in the middle of the bushfire crisis have now been replaced by thundering falls over the sandstone escarpment.
Wentworth Falls, two suburbs down from the popular tourist location of Katoomba, is usually a modest trickle.
On Monday rare photos of Wentworth Falls emerged, transformed into a thundering, powerful waterfall.
A spectacular picture of a fire-fall was captured in the Blue Mountains (left) during the bushfire crisis in December. Heavy rains have transformed the modest Wentworth Falls waterfall (right) in the Blue Mountains into a raging torrent
Twitter user Kate also uploaded astonishing fire and flood contrast photos from her home on the NSW mid-north coast which quickly went viral being retweeted 851 times in just a few hours on Sunday evening.
The pictures show the same patch of suburban gardens with a verandah bordered by a long row of tall trees and a couple of banana plants.
‘From one extreme to another,’ Kate tweeted.
The banana trees somehow survived the fire and put forth healthy heads of new green leaves that bobbed above the grey flood in the second picture.
Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains normally has a modest flow (left) but weekend rains turned it into a raging torrent on Monday (right)
Weather irony: this bushfire warning sign was nearly submerged by floods
‘How tough are those banana plants?’ joked one Twitter user.
‘Indestructible,’ Kate replied.
‘Sorry … I was praying the rains would come and put the fires out. I may have overdone it just a little,’ tweeted Karen-Lynn.
‘Prayers don’t do anything, so I wouldn’t blame yourself,’ replied Pete B.
In November (left) the ground was black and burnt in Kate’s picture. Now, in February, the grass is green but the ground is mostly under water
Kate also posted comparison shots of a burnt row of spikey pandanus on blackened grasslands from November compared to lush green vegetation and a running brown flood in February.
‘It is great for us but honestly its low-key flooding and is meant to rain for the next week,’ she tweeted on Friday.
In an amazing twist of weather irony, one person managed to snap a picture of a roadside LED sign warning of bushfire danger – that was nearly submerged by floods.
The picture was quickly uploaded to news sharing website Reddit with the apt headline ‘Australia summed up’.
‘Like the sign, Australia keeps hanging on to life, in the midst of adversity,’ wrote Redditor Doxedon.
‘Those c**ts and their hoses!’ joked Redditor Manueljs
EMPTY DAMS FILL IN DOWNPOUR
Parched dams around Sydney are swelling to their highest levels in years as heavy rainfall continues to drench eastern NSW.
Government water supplier WaterNSW says Warragamba Dam west of Sydney is forecast to receive its best inflows since April 2017.
Warragamba Dam, the primary source of water for urban Sydney, was sitting near 44 per cent of capacity on Sunday afternoon and was predicted to rise to 55 per cent.
The increase was equal to recouping nine months of water supply in less than a week, WaterNSW said.
While water catchments in eastern parts of the state have received a boost, other drought-stricken inland areas have not been so lucky.
The Burrendong Dam, which serves major regional areas in western NSW such as Dubbo, was at just one per cent capacity on Sunday, according to WaterNSW.
Ash and debris left after the recent bushfire crisis are likely to wash into the Warragamba catchment but will not impact water quality.
‘Any surface debris is being avoided by extracting water from 30 metres below the surface as a precaution,’ a WaterNSW spokesman said.
Two booms – also known as silt curtains – have been placed upstream of the dam to catch silt before it reaches the dam itself.
Other dams serving the metropolitan Sydney area, including the Nepean, Cataract, Avon and Woronora dams, have all recieved a welcome top up, WaterNSW added.
The Tallowa Dam in the Shoalhaven area has also started to fill.
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