Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition
In which we find ourselves in another part of the world
The sky wasn’t actually that blue this morning, but the NZ Tourism Commission must’ve slipped a little something to Apple so that photos like this get more likes.
The water in Manly Bay was about a degree (C) warmer today than just a week ago, and you can see the light colored new growth on the pohutukawa tree…
Spring is coming!
Normally there’s plenty of rain in Wellington, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 inches a year. So water hasn’t been something to worry about… they don’t even have water meters.
But last summer was dry, and people had to start conserving a little bit. For someone who grew up in Southern California, the water restrictions imposed on Wellingtonians were laughably easy to comply with, but the whole thing made them very upset.
It came to light that something like a quarter of all their water was being lost to leaks. And that without a substantial increase in local taxes, there’s no way those leaks are getting fixed this decade. It’s never been a problem so they just kind of let things get a bit out of hand.
I’d never noticed the many leaks before, but you know what? They’re everywhere down there!
There’s more political context… one of the divisive issues in the last election was the Labour Party trying to a do a big, difficult, expensive thing to make water infrastructure better and more fair. They lost bigly to the National Party who said, Nah, let’s just cut taxes and the infrastructure will sort itself out.
So, the rains came back, and the people sorta forgot / gave up, and the water still gushes out of holes in the pipes.
I wish there was a happy ending here, or some way to not see this story as exactly what’s going on with lots of big expensive difficult issues we face as a society.
I think of the story of the phoenix mostly in terms of rising from the ashes. But I guess it first has to burst into flames and die.
With temperatures in the 40s next week, I will be unusually happy to be (mostly) stuck inside for the HL7 Working Group Meeting in Phoenix next week!
As an aside… I’ve never actually experienced 45 degree temperatures since I started speaking Celsius. But I know it’s really hot thanks to Midnight Oil. Who says all that time spent watching MTV was wasted??
I know it doesn’t seem like much if you’re from the American west or any number of other places… but this baby-pea-size hail was pretty unusual for here!
As we approach two weeks since the Auckland floods, the extent of the damage is coming clear.
There were hundreds of little land slips like in the picture above. The water in the bay remains murky and probably full of s**t from all the sewage overflows. Only a few people actually died, which is good, but dozens of homes will be torn down and thousands more are seriously damaged. Lots of cars written off. It’s still unknown how much damage to the sewer and water systems. The residents of one nearby area seem to have gotten a bad tummy bug and suspect their water is contaminated.
Here’s another shot of the tennis court in Little Shoal Bay. The Bowling Club is redoing the floor… with real plywood this time instead of the MDF that was in there before. It’s surprising that it was ever allowable to use that MDF in a building built on piling above a tidal marsh. Probably it wasn’t.
I found this informative timeline of how the storm developed… it was a convergence of multiple factors that brought us so much rain.
This week’s earthquake in Turkey is a reminder — if any was needed — that this storm was No Big Deal. But that’s only a little comfort to the people affected. And we have another cyclone heading our way this weekend which has the potential to be just as bad… ugh!
The official Auckland reporting station got something like 10” of rain on Friday. In our neighborhood, the total was more like 12” according to some amateur meteorologists. Our driveway turned back into the stream it once was. But luckily our house sits out of the path so no damage to us.
Lots of friends and neighbors had their basements get wet. We know one person whose ground-level apartment was chest deep underwater, and her car was completely submerged. Yuck! The bowling / pétanque club took on close to a foot of water, so we went down and helped clean up.
There were a lot of mudslides, and with so many houses perched on hillsides or next to cliff edges, the damage will be costly. In the shot above, that house is a lot closer to the edge of the cliff than it used to be, and the public tennis court is out of service for the foreseeable. Surely this flood will reignite the discussion about letting the whole Little Shoal Bay park complex go back to marshy wetlands.
We’ve lived through floods before, one-day events like this as well as the big Midwest floods of 1993 and 1995. People will recover and rebuild. But it will be hard, and it will eat up so much of the financial and mental breathing room for affected families and the whole city over the next couple of years… instead of doing whatever was next on the list, our efforts will step back down the hierarchy of needs ladder by a step or two. It’s a shame, although I think unavoidable with this many people living in this particular place. Of course drainage systems could be improved, but the cost of truly flood-proofing all the houses and roads in Auckland would be unacceptable.
This past weekend was the annual Parnell Rose Festival. Although this is our third year living just up the street, we hadn’t made it to the festival before. One detail I’d never noticed before was how the big container ship unloading cranes loom in the background. It’s kind of cool about Auckland that a lot of things are close like that, but it manages not to feel crowded.
Anyway… back to the festival. The roses are at their peak, which was just lovely. The festival brings out dozens, maybe hundreds of people smelling, photographing, and enjoying the flowers.
And hundreds more bring their kids for games and face painting and so on.
And thousands more who crowded into the food truck area to stand in line for overpriced and dubious quality eats. Go figure.
This pink tree is definitely one of the nice early signs that spring is around the corner. The birds love these flowers.
Running through Cornwall Park yesterday… no dogs, please, it’s lambing season. It’s pretty great to have this park, totally available to the public, in an otherwise ordinary suburban neighborhood just a few miles from downtown.
Suddenly, it started to rain! Hard!
Even the rickshaw guys took refuge.
Within minutes, the poncho vendors appeared. And it works, the micro-economy works efficiently. Yay!
But we are seasoned travelers because we had already bought ponchos in a Bali downpour– and left them behind. So we knew how to ride out the storm…
* the post title is actually a quote from Longfellow, but to me it’s the slogan of a mortuary in LA that advertised on bus benches when I was in high school.
We wonder how native Australasian people feel about the changing seasons … for us, when the days get short and cold, the leaves fall, the snow flies, we think of Christmas. But Christmas here is when you can finally swim in the ocean without a wetsuit, when it’s light till almost 10, and so on. Does the thrill translate, or does the magic of Christmas rely somehow on the whole winter solstice idea?
The winter garden building
Means jackets at the beach and early-blooming trees.
On the way to work the other morning. The part of the day where you can be comfortable in shorts is getting really limited now.
A cottonwood tree, or something like one, is close enough to a white Christmas for us this year.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 