Back in 1909 Dorothea Mackellar nailed it, apart from the bushfires.

Im glad your not reading Mother Shipton of doom

Hi GTC. How things change.

I think that I will need swimming lessons soon. It is bucketing down as I write. Two days without a pause. Surprisingly, there are still some fires burning. I guess that the rain is over my house and not the fires. The, Gosper Mountain, fire has been going since October.

Take care driving everybody, I am surprised as I drive about, how easy it is to trigger the ABS braking system, and the,Stability Control.

I'm too old to be a Hoon. I drive conservatively. It might have something to do with the replacement van I'm driving. Mine broke down on the M2 motorway. P0200 DTC.

We'll all be roond, said Hanrahan.

Labrat: I'm secretary of the Owners Corporation at the business complex where my workshop is located. Over the last two days during the deluge I've been fielding phone calls, SMS messages and emails complaining about water leaks in roofs, as if I can do anything about them. People seem to think that roofers go out in downpours to attend to leaks, as if roofers are the SES attending to emergencies. I have to tell them that they need to cope with the situation themselves as there will be nobody available for weeks if not months after the rain stops and take photos to make insurance claims, if necessary.

Here's a link to the full text and some notes about it and the author. Enjoy!
:
http://www.cattlefacts.com.au/Poem%20Said%20Hanrahan.asp

Just took advantage of a respite in the deluge to get some stuff at the shops. Trees down everywhere, including in my street, and power lines and HFC cables, too. I'm on underground power and haven't cut over to NBN (via HFC) yet so am still on the air, touch wood.

I heard a crash sound late last night and have just discovered that two large trees have been blown down onto a group of 3 garages and a ute parked beside them where I live. SES is too busy to attend right now.

Take a look here. We are surrounded by cyclones at the moment:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=138.16,-23.72,793

Sydney gets bad storms I remember a bad one in the 90s that left the northern suburbs looking like a bomb went off.
I was in Hornsby shops when the sky turned green and the a wind came like a cyclone and the windows all smashed at the shops .
Trees were up rooted all along the Northside with wrecked houses .
One lady was killed in her car as a tree fell, I think it was burns road , the back way to Hornsby..
That was the worst storm I have ever seen.
Pete

My house in Sydney got blacked out, presumably by a fallen tree, so I came out here to Hilltop. The rain has been gale-force and horizontal all day, gutters overflowing, everything has turned into a swamp. The ponds are full to overflowing.

Certainly, a land of extremes.

Not so bad here in Canberra. The rain is most welcome.

Only a short while back, headlines like this related to bushfires:

QUOTE: ‘Prepare to leave’: Flood evacuation orders as Sydney faces wettest weekend since 1998

Pete, that Hornsby storm included a tornado, which tore part of the roof off Westfield. I remember it well.

That area is notorious for high winds though not well known for supercells that generate tornadoes. Most tornadoes in NSW (and they do form more often than most realise) occur off the coast as water spouts and generally die out before hitting land. It's rare for them to form over land.

I was on the road a fair bit today. A stranded BMW on Victoria Road at Ermington, coppers had River Road at Lane Cove blocked, lots of trees down everywhere, power out between Gladesville and Lane Cove, a land slide at Leura which has blocked the Blue Mountains rail line until further notice and buses are replacing trains between Lawson and Mt Victoria.

In line with GTC's comment, I send an all staff e-mail at work today with the theme "blankets and buckets". Staff who were demanding that I spend time on the roof fixing the myriad of water leaks and each one reporting a leak demanding that their leaks be fixed first were told to get knotted. Being the site engineer, it's my role to decide what gets fixed first, by who and when. Sometimes people just need reminding that maintenance staff do not go onto the roof for any reason when heaven is dumping 150mm of rain on us and the wind is blowing at up to 100km/h off the harbour. And, let's face it, no building in Sydney has drains designed to take away the rainfall we've had in the last few days.

The repair job on the rail line at Leura will take a while I reckon. A retaining wall will need to be built to sort that out and I dare say that the rain will have to stop before work begins.

Despite the damage, I am pleased to see that the rain is falling everywhere and now starting to top up dams across the state, some of which barely had a few litres of water left in them until now.

... and I just got an SMS and email from the fire monitoring company advising that "The fire alarm has activated and has been automatically transmitted to your state Fire Service for the deployment of fire appliances".

Presumably one of the leaks has let water into one of the 200 or so sensors in the complex. The fireys get driven nuts by the volume of such false alarms during bad weather.

Brad you remember it!
My brother and I were at Hornsby Westfield when it hit, the complete glass front of Westfield smashed right in front of us.
At the time it was so bad people didn't think it was a storm.
It felt like the world was ending.
I can't remember the year, 92 93, about then .
Pete