Wild Weather

There was a wind warning for Tuesday night.  Expect gale force winds of up to 140km per hour.  Make sure that everything outside is secured.

We walked around to check everything.  The new partially finished roof on the farrowing shed was secured by cargo strops.  The outdoor furniture was folded up and moved to somewhere fairly secure.  The rubbish pile behind the shed - bits of wire, pallets waiting to be cut for firewood, random bits of crap that we’ve picked up from all around the place, the window we took out of a bedroom - was looked over, but there wasn’t a great deal we could do with it.

We looked at the empty 30 000 litre water tank that we’re planning to use for rainwater and irrigation.  This has flown before.  It used to reside behind the big shed, but we moved it so that we could start to set it up.  It was on it’s edge in our woodlot and we’d been trying to figure out just how we’d roll it onto it’s flat side and move it to exactly where we wanted it.  One morning we got up to find it up a slight hill and halfway over a fence.  There had been a small tornado hit a town nearby, so I wondered if we’d had a taste of it here too.  This time though, the tank was wedged between two Macrocarpa trees and blocked by a fence.  We couldn’t see it moving anywhere easily so judged it safe to leave as it was.

We thought we’d done as much as we were able and went inside to have our dinner.  The wind was picking up speed and strength.

There was an odd noise an hour or so later.  A rumble that came from the wrong side of the house to where the wind was coming from.  Looking out the window showed nothing obvious.  Maybe, we thought, it was just the wind ripping across the tunnelhouse covers or the tarpaulin on the dog kennel.

Hubby remembered the trampoline.  A large 14’ round one.  We rushed outside to dismantle it.  That was terrifying.  I stood on one of the feet to be ballast while Hubby pulled the springs out.  Once he was about halfway round, the wind did the rest.  I held onto the mat which was now flapping like a sail and threatened to take me flying with it, but I did manage to fold it safely, if roughly. 

Hubby couldn’t settle at this stage.  He turned the electric fence off as he could see the sparks and arcs from it - it had taken some damage and was obviously in contact with something it shouldn’t be.  But as there were a lot of sparks from all sorts of random places, fixing it was a job for daylight and no wind.  He kept prowling around the sheds and the outside of the house, checking and double checking that all was as secure as it could be.  I started to walk down into the wind, to the farrowing shed to check the corrugated iron roof, but quickly realised that if a branch broke off or the tin came loose I wouldn’t see it in time or have any chance to get out of the way.  Instead, I shone my little torch in that direction.

This is where the water tank used to be.

It took me a couple of seconds to realise that I had an unhindered view of the shed.  “Where’s the water tank?” I asked.  Hubby came running.  “That’ll be what that noise was”.  We walked all around our house and the immediate vicinity, there was no sign of it.  I looked along the road, as far as my little torch could shine, nothing.

As we walked back to the house, I noticed that the house had gone dark.  Power was off.  Not surprising really.  It came back on and then went off again just as quickly.  At that point we turned the mains off.  I’ve had a washing machine die recently from a power spike and had no intention of letting that happen to any other appliances.

After that, there didn’t seem to be much we could do.  The kids were already in bed.  In the complete darkness of an unpowered house in the countryside with the wind roaring all around us, we went to bed and tried to sleep.  The darkness was split by a sudden bright flash.  Now we were getting lightning too.  I couldn’t understand this as the sky had been clear.  I got up to get a drink of water and looked out of the kitchen window towards Mt Grey.  There were some clouds over the mountain, which were brightened suddenly by more lightning.  Ah, so that was were it was.  I could see an orange glow, coming and going to the south of us, near the mountain.  It looked like a light from a small plane or helicopter, but there was no way they’d be flying in this weather.  From the worried texts I’d received from my family in Christchurch, reports said we were getting winds of 200km/h.  I shrugged it off and went back to bed.

I didn’t sleep very well though, as much as I tried.  I’d be almost asleep and there would be another blinding flash of lightning, a crash or the whole north side of the house would creak and flex and I’d start worrying about the windows blowing in, or a rogue branch breaking off and hitting a window.  I must have slept at some stage.  I recall waking up to silence during the night and realising that the wind must have settled down or stopped.

I was woken up by a text message on my phone.  It was 7:30am and Miss Seven’s school sent a text to say they had power and water and would open as normal, but the buses would be running slowly because of the roads.  We got up and woke the kids.  Hubby got his camp fuel burner out to make us a cuppa.  It hadn’t been used in several years and we soon found that it leaked when he nearly set the whole kitchen alight.  It took all day to get rid of the smell of the fuelite gas.  We started the coal range and put a pot of water on to boil.

Our special tree before.

Our tree taken from the same place.

We had a brief look around outside to survey the damage.  Hubby was anxious to find the water tank, I was worried that the water tank had caused damage to fences perhaps letting someone’s stock out or had taken out power lines or was maybe blocking a road.  One side of the Chook run was down, so this needed fixing before the dog was allowed to run - he’s already killed one hen who was a determined escape artist. 

Our tree again.

Then we saw the tree.  This tree has always been special for us.  Not only is there something magical about the tree itself, but last November we were married under it.  We loved that tree and are much saddened by it’s loss.  Okay, compared to many around us, it’s a pretty minor thing and we were lucky, but it was important to us.

I rang a neighbour on their mobile to make sure they were okay.  I’d taken her to the Doctor’s last week and I knew she was very sick.  They were fine, he’d dug out the old transistor radio and they were listening to the news.  There was a huge forest fire west of Amberley - which is about where we are - could I see anything?  I thought it might have been on the other side of the mountain.  We could see no smoke, but had been hearing helicopters on and off.

We took Miss Seven to school.  By the time she was up and organised it was nearly time for school to start.  Master Fifteen got ready for school (which is an achievement in itself) and we were going to drive him to his school in Rangiora.  On our little road, which sees hardly any traffic, we were stopped by a neighbour who was driving around checking up on people.  We mentioned the water tank, and they knew where it was.  Don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere.  Then another neighbour drove up and asked if we were all okay, did we need anything?  The neighbourly spirit in rural areas really is heartwarming.  Master Fifteen, with all his teenage cynicism thought it was a clever and polite way of being nosy and checking out how much damage everyone else had, but I pointed out to him that emergency services are further away for us, we help each other out because we hope that someone will be there for us when we need it.

The water tank now, at the neighbours.

After dropping Miss Seven off at school, Master Fifteen received a text message to tell him that his school was closed.  We went up the road past ours, up the next valley to check on friends who lived up there.  We could only go about halfway.  The road was closed by a fire crew and a helicopter was just taking off from the paddock beside the road.

Trees were down everywhere.  Carnage is the only way to describe it.  We live in a high wind area at the best of times, so there are a lot of tall hedges and shelter belts.  They were a mess.  Splintered, snapped branches jutted out from nearly every hedgerow.  Branches littered the sides of the roads, in places you could see that they’d already been cut into manageable lengths and pulled off the road.  Entire trees, trunks a metre thick were pulled up and lying down in paddocks.  Massive clumps of dirt still tangled in their roots and gaping holes showed where they had once stood.  Road signs were snapped off at the base and a local sign with steel tube legs had turned 90 degrees - one leg has obviously broken.

Steel legged road sign - turned 90 degrees.

I sent a text message to the friends we couldn’t reach.  They were in the UK, but their neighbour had been evacuated because of the fire.  They were feeling a little odd.  Last time they’d gone back to the UK there were the September 2010 earthquakes.  I joked that their sense of timing was incredible, they joked that they obviously can’t leave us to look after the place.

The chook run

We fixed the side of the chook run, a quick and temporary fix, but enough to work for now and had a slightly better look around at the damage.  Fences that we knew were tired and needed work were now flattened.  Fortunately, all the cattle were in other paddocks.  Two windows from the larger unit that we’d taken out of a room had flown about 10 metres and landed unbroken.  I’m really not sure how they managed to fly over a lot of lighter stuff, not to mention all the bricks they must have come in contact with and still not break.

We could see the water tank now, down the creek at the neighbours.  It looks fairly well dented in.  The neighbour was impressed, it had gone over 2 fences and several plum trees to get where it is and there is no noticeable damage to the fences or those trees.  My Dad has schemes for it if it’s no good to hold water anymore.  He thinks it’ll make a good pig house with a little modification.

Hubby went off to work for the afternoon, but sent reports of pink batts and roofing iron on the roads.  The power came back on mid afternoon - in time for Miss Seven to get home from school!

I quite enjoyed having a day with no power.  I got so much done that I probably normally wouldn’t have.  I also came to the conclusion that living rurally requires a certain level of self-sufficiency whether that’s your goal or not.  We lose power at least once a year, usually in a storm.  With the coal range, candles and board games, it’s an annoyance rather than a problem.  We may get a generator now though - we have our first cattle beastie in the big freezer and that would be heart-breaking to lose.

The yellowish clay in the centre of this picture is the dirt clinging to the roots of a mighty fallen tree.

An entire hedge uprooted.