The Weather Deteriorates

Blackouts again swept the mountains today - they've been a constant pattern for over the last week now, lending a third-world feel to the place - that mildewy post-colonial tropical hell hole feel.

With more of the same forecast for the rest of the week local businesses must be spewing. The only place that's still open when the power goes up here is Coles - they have their own generator.

I thought it was trade unionists in braces that switched the power off in small businesses? Who'd a thunk that the biggest risk lay from an increasingly erratic weather system.

What's driving that?

I lost an afternoon's work to the blackouts. We've all been there. One of those I-want-to-kill-my-computer moments. But that's just the juvenile frustration we never honestly grow out of. Besides, it's hardly my computer's fault if God lays a direct hit on a substation.

My thoughts go the Integral Energy blokes who have to work in this mayhem. You'd need more than money to get me to stand next to a transformer during an electrical storm.

To cap it all off my 6pm appointment cancelled, which came as something of a relief, so I went for a walk to celebrate.

The storms that have lashed Katoomba over the last week or so have been wilder than I thought.

The picture above shows where a tree, looking like it has been struck by lightening, has crashed through a guard rail. The force that these buggers come down with can be measured by the fact that it has bent the galvanised steel pole like it was cardboard.

This was just part of the same tree that was spread-eagled across about 20 square metres of bush adjacent to the top cataract of Katoomba Falls.

The Falls themselves where in fine mettle, as this YouTube clip shows:



A short distance away on the escarpment, at Cliff View Lookout, I captured the Jamison Valley after the storm, with the weather clearing, if a little bit unstable, to the west.