Up in smoke again

[bhk]

We've been experiencing an unprecedented heatwave here over the past month and it culminated yesterday (Sunday our time) in more than 80 bushfires raging across the state.
I will never have been so glad to see the end of a summer when this one finally fades out.

[Deleted]

Yup, tragic I think Bruce. I was reading the other day about how Aus has been experiencing hotter and hotter summers over recent years and these fires I suppose are the inevitable result. Mother Nature takes no account of the fact that humans like living and building their homes on tree-covered countryside.

I see that the California drought that's lasted for several years was recently broken to the extent that an over-flow of a dam in the north (not the dam itself fortunately) is under threat of collapse and I wonder if this presages a possible cooling of the climate in your neck of the woods?

[bhk]

Every time we experience extremes of weather here Roger I always think of Dorothea MacKellar's "My Country" and particularly the second verse.
All schoolkids know at least that verse.....and I learned it when I was but a young primary-school kid.

"My Country" is an iconic patriotic poem about Australia, written by Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1968) at the age of 19 while homesick in the United Kingdom. After travelling through Europe extensively with her father during her teenage years, she started writing the poem in London in 1904 and re-wrote it several times before her return to Sydney. The poem was first published in The Spectator in London on 5 September 1908.

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

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![/i]

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

[bhk]

Feb 13, 2017 16:33:55 GMT -5 rollerball said:

..... an over-flow of a dam in the north (not the dam itself fortunately) is under threat of collapse ...

That's the Oroville Dam, on the Feather River (home of the Union Pacific "Feather River Route").
There are some very dramatic aerial videos on Y-Tube.



I wasn't aware that it is the highest dam wall in the USA......I always thought it was the Hoover Dam which held that distinction.

As you say, Roger, it's not the wall that is in danger but due to the flow over the emergency spillway (now not flowing) and the normal spillway (severely damaged at it's lower section) it's South Oroville and points further downstream which could be flooded.