I was once at the rather palatial new home of a friend (their polished granite kitchen counter-tops cost more than my house) and they had just moved in from living in a large shed on the property.  In a room of its own was the largest size of slate pool table ever made, where the far pockets would have disappeared in the smoke haze of a 60’s pub.  Must weigh a respectable portion of a ton.  “Gee, how did you get this down here?” I asked. “With a telephone” she replied.  Even considering the widest mechanical applications of a telephone, I could not see how it would help.  She waited patiently until I finally blurted out “A removalist!”

I was so slow to catch on because I am so used to doing everything myself, I don’t even consider the possibility of getting somebody else to do it.  This comes from being penurious for most of my life.  Sorry about the big word, but skint got rejected with a wavy red line.  This is the great divide between the country life and the city life.  Perhaps I carry it to extremes.  In a city, somebody else is responsible for just about every service and function that modern life requires.  If it goes wrong, pick up the phone and complain.  I can complain all I like here, and I do, but nobody is coming to fix my problems.  So DIY is not an interesting hobby in the sticks, it is a survival technique.  If you have a property 600kms east of Alice Springs, forget getting a plumber.  As an aside, I have just had the most bizarre suggestion from spell-check.  How did 600kms prompt it to suggest “sikhisms”?  And then underlines the word it has given me???   ???=WTF

What necessitates DIY as a lifestyle, is poverty and remoteness, in that order.  The downside is that you have got to get out there and fix all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  The upside is that you do.  It is empowering and you acquire skills, save money and get some satisfaction overcoming problems.  And it gets easier with practice.  And you become more independent of ‘the system’.  And you lose the anxiety that comes with other people having control of your fate.  I can’t be fired, I can cope with fluctuations of income, collapse of civilisation etc.  Until recent times, Aboriginals had that freedom.  They could go bush in a small group and not be reliant on any infrastructure.

On the whole, I prefer the freedom of self-sufficiency over the convenience of services.  This will change as I age and become less competent.  Until finally I am thankful for someone to feed me porridge in the morning.   Until then, I battle on.

Which brings me, with no discernible segue, to my topic on the disadvantages of DIY.  A few weeks ago I had a half ton branch drop onto the transmission lines down to the sauna, breaking the wires.  The connections broken were up a pole about 8m high.  My extension ladder would just about reach that height, but I found that my courage wouldn’t.  As I went up the ladder it started shaking, I started shaking, the pole started shaking and we all hit a harmonic frequency of seismic proportions.  I carefully retreated to the ground.   A decade or two ago I had climbed the ladder to attach the wires but I was no longer game to do so.  In traditional British style, I went for a cup of tea.  Plan B.  I would tackle the problem from terra firma.  The more firmer, the less terror.  With the aid of ropes, wire clamps, long sticks etc, I was able to hook on the wires from the ground.

Last week, the same bit of line was brought down again by a very large twenty ton tree.  I could see immediately that it was too dangerous to chainsaw out of the way.  It had snapped the trunk 5m from the ground and tangled with other trees and supported by a mess of branches, and still attached to the 5m stump.  So hard to see what was supporting what.  Even if I had a cherry picker, which I haven’t, some branches could break up rather than down.  So it is staying there and the wires are going over the top.  One 9m pole was snapped off at the ground but I will recycle it in another location.

So I have pulled out the wires from under the tree and with some difficulty pulled them over the tree.  When I reconnect the power the wires will be touching the tree, but I have found this is not a problem.  There may be some minor leakage of electricity, but no real problem.  I will wait until I have no guests before I continue as I need to use the chainsaw and my old ute to re-erect the power pole.  The ute still has the remains of a muffler, but alas not connected to the engine.  It sounds like a phalanx of Harleys cruising down the road.  I will spare my guests that.

So city dwellers can fix just about anything with a telephone and a chequebook.  Out in the sticks, we need a whole heap of tools and more than a little effort.  Maybe next post I will show you how I pick up an 8m 300kg power pole, move it 20m and shove it back in the ground.  Don’t expect bulging muscles and Schwarzenegger  torso.

 

About 6 weeks back Possum Valley had record floods.  Not record rains and it wasn’t even a cyclone, the creek reached the highest levels I have seen in the 38 years I have been here and left mud and debris on the veranda of Blackbean Cottage.  That has never happened before.  The creek height is more sensitive to the intensity of the rain rather than the total as I live right at the top of a catchment area.  “I reported this in my blog “Fixing Things”.  Great, spellcheck has never heard of a blog.  I have now fixed most things affected by the flood and just yesterday was hauling into position the bridge down at Blackbean Cottage when guests arrived.  The task entailed crawling around and through the newly deposited soft organic debris, and in places I sunk up to my crutch.  I hauled myself out of the swamp to do my duties as receptionist.  I was not at my sartorial best.  Anyone who knows me would recognise “my sartorial best” as an oxymoron.  I was even worse than my usual dilapidated state.  The driver stuck his hand out and and said “Graeme”.  I looked down at my dripping hand, only moderately decorated with unidentified organic debris, and said “just come out of the creek”, giving him the option of withdrawing.  But the obligation to shake hands is strong and he stoically replied “just so long as it hasn’t just come out of a cows bum” and we shook hands.  How delightfully Australian.  He didn’t mind a bit that I looked like the creature from the black lagoon as there is still respect for people who do hard manual work, and he defused any embarrassment with a crude comment.

Anyway, that isn’t what I meant to write about.  The floods also damaged the road in.  Stripped gravel, roughened the surface and dug some alarming gullies.  It is a council road so I sought some emergency help from the council.  There, I have finally got round to addressing the title.  So I sent an e-mail to council with pictures I share with you.

“Hi long-suffering ‘report a problem’ person,

To help you get rid of this e-mail in the shortest possible time (do not press delete), it is concerning road maintenance in the Herberton shire.

Along with many in the shire, a few weekends ago I “enjoyed” the most intense rain I have seen in the 38 years I have been resident here.  My hydro system was trashed, my water pump swept away a bridge demolished etc.  Amongst the carnage, Pickles Road which is the only access to my property was severely gullied in several places.  I am asking for some some assistance to make it trafficable.  If asking isn’t enough, I begs.  I run a B&B at the end of this road, and I fear that my guests may be slightly annoyed if their cars are damaged in the attempt to get here.  It is quite possible if they lose a wheel into one of the gullies, they will be hopelessly stranded on the car’s belly.  I attach a couple of pics.  The scale is provided by a carpenter’s hammer.

The really challenging piece of road is only 70m long, but the gully meanders from side to side and therefore unavoidable.  There are other sections that definitely require attention, but not an immediate threat to the destruction of cars.

It is a council road and a council responsibility, but I realise that like me, the council does not have long pockets.  Probably, like me, the pockets they do have, are owned by the banks. Therefore I am asking for the minimum response to make the road trafficable. 1 truck, 1 driver, 1 day to deliver some loads of gravel to give my guests a sporting chance of being able to negotiate the road.  If the driver makes some attempt to distribute the gravel, I have a little 17HP tractor with a 4 ft back blade that will make a heroic effort to shape and camber the road before his next delivery. Hopefully, he can roll and compact on the next delivery.  With a little coordination, I think much may be achieved at minimal cost. I would have to know when he was coming, meet him to indicate the critical section, and frantically scrape up and down during his turn-around time.

Please forward this plaintive plea to the right person.”

The council took a week to respond, but I received a reply assuring me that they would look into it as soon as they could.  Hmmmm……… I think I know what that means.   I guess an emergency response might be coming at about 2022.  That is not a time.  That is a date.

I have seen the council tearing up 500m of bitumen in Atherton that I had been driving over for decades without detecting a problem, then spending months of work with droves of machines and a phalanx of workers to put some different bitumen in its place.

For someone like me who has always strived for efficient use of resources in my personal life, this is hugely frustrating.

To my guests present and future, the road is still negotiable, but you will want to pick your way carefully.  For those inconvenienced by the road, please contact http://www.trc.qld.gov.au/ and offer them your opinion.  It is called Pickles Road in the Shire of Herberton.

I have looked at trying to do something with the road myself, but there is simply not enough gravel to grade.

As for other services provided by the council I enjoy the use of the tip, but there is no collection service so I haul myself, and the use of the library.  I have made weekly use of the library for over three decades now and I treasure this last bastion of a free service.  There is no water/sewerage/electricity out in the rural areas.  Nobody tends gardens or cuts grass anywhere near here.  No swimming pools or parks, esplanade walks or kids playgrounds, public toilets or walking tracks, bike lanes or signage that the council might have to look after.

The only possible return for the substantial rates I pay would be the maintenance of the road.  No other service (except for the library, only 60km round trip), is available to me.

There, I have had my whinge.  Feeling much better now.

I was showing the hydro system to some guests last weekend (what man tires of showing off his handiwork), and had occasion to point out a date crudely scratched into the wet concrete of the base.  10/83.  Yesterday I was putting washing on the line and my mind wandered from the dull task to do some mental arithmetic, as one does for entertainment.  I realised that the hydro has been providing me with power 24/7 for the last 32 years.  For half my life, I have provided my own power.  I designed and built a machine that has been working for me continuously for 32 years  That is 280,320 hours.  Slaves are generally not that reliable.

It is nearly all the original equipment.  The generator has now done about 25,000,000,000 revolutions and the turbine has used 100,915,200 tons of water.  Approx.  When I say ‘used’, every drop is returned to the creek.  So what do I extract from the water to make the power?  Energy cannot be created or destroyed in this universe, it can only be converted.  So what am I taking from the water that is not the water itself?  Heat.  If the water tumbled down the waterfall, friction would heat it by a tiny fraction of a degree.  It bypasses the rocks down a smooth pipe with much less friction and is less heated by the turbine than it would have been by crashing over rocks.

So I have replaced the 2 drive v-belts about every 2 years, the turbine and generator bearings about every 4 years, the generator brushes about every 3 years, the slip rings about every decade.  Some pipes have been trashed by floods, but most are the originals, The top weir and turbine housing survive unchanged.  Have you every had a machine that worked non-stop for 32 years?

I have actually seen a working machine that has worked 24/7 for 150 years.  The only time it got maintenance was Xmas day when it got some grease.  It was a coal lift for a mile deep mine in the UK.  They didn’t expect to have to do more than grease once a year for the next 250 years.  I went down the mine and having a mile of rock over ones head propped up by crumpled steel pillars is a thought provoking experience.  I expect that magnificent steam engine operated by a ‘winder-driver’ of considerable experience, has now been replaced by an electric motor computer controlled.  Sigh.

I had a thought that I would like to give some feed-back to Stamford the makers of the generator in the UK, which has withstood the harshest operating conditions at the bottom of a waterfall in a tropical jungle, being swept away in floods, being jammed solid with rocks and sand, immersed in water for days at a time and other mishaps not covered by the operating manual.  I fondly imagined some white-haired old engineers stirring their tea in a spartan canteen, would get a moment’s satisfaction when I clinically reported that after 30 years of use and abuse, their design had proved satisfactory.  Time has moved on, even if I haven’t, and now I find from  a web search, that the Stamford name is now manufactured in China.  Those white-haired engineers have probably retired to Spain for the last decade.

I have spent the last two weeks fixing things after the heavy deluge saw record floods at Possum Valley.  Cyclone Marcia crossed the coast as a category 5 early this morning, and is rampaging inland.  I have no doubt other people will be spending some considerable time “fixing things” as well.  Australia’s climate has always been noted in having a high variability index, being a land of extreme conditions, and it may well get worse.  From a “Sunburnt country, with droughts and flooding rains”, to all that plus being blown and blasted away.  Blown by cyclones and the floods here were from a whole train of thunderstorms in a few hours blasting me away.  Once again a naked man dashing around the house in the night, pulling out electrical connections to avoid being blown up.

Sure, you can always debate data, and the conclusions drawn from that data, and science always does.  There is dubious research and confusion in the fog of statistics, but the avalanche of information clearly indicates that global climate change is happening to you and me, and it is here and now, at a corner store near you.  And Australia is particularly vulnerable.  Perhaps not quite as much as many of our Pacific neighbours whose countries might disappear entirely, but on the endangered list. And what are we doing about it?  Sandbags.  Much media coverage of people and council workers filling sandbags.  Expect a lot more sandbags in the future, because little is being done to treat the causes, only palliative treatment to alleviate the symptoms.  A major cause of extreme weather events is clearly man’s tinkering with the atmosphere.  Our present government clearly thinks a BAN (Business As Normal) is the appropriate response.  Keep filling the sandbags.

My own feeble efforts to fix things include firmly fixing the steel ram pump down pipes using rock bolts.  This means drilling holes in rock.  Hard rock.  Just 10m away, the same rock laid down at the same time (about 400,000,000 years ago), is weathered by chemical erosion and I can hammer in 20mm by 200mm spikes with a sledge hammer.  It took me a morning and 2 destroyed rock drills to make 2 holes. I sincerely hope that my latest effort is successful in flood-proofing the pump because ITOFTS  (I’m too old for this shit).

I have spent the last two days repairing roads. Dear reader, I know that such a thought has never entered your head, but just for a moment imagine that you cant go anywhere because your road is trashed, and that you have to do something about it.  No one is coming to help.  The gravel has been stripped, and gullies have torn the driving surface so that cars will bottom out and wheels spin uselessly on slippy clay.  The whole profile of the road has to be changed so that the next downpour will divert the water off the road.  Fortunately, I have a little 17 HP tractor with a 4 ft back blade.  I can angle the blade and pitch either side up or down to cut and grade soil onto the road to reshape it to a nice round camber to get the water to run off into drains either side.  Then all that is required is to resurface it with gravel.  For this I use equipment commonly known as a shovel.  I take my old ute to my gravel stockpile and shovel a couple of tons on, drive it to the road and shovel it off again.  It is distressing how little coverage a couple of tons of gravel actually gives you on the road.  Rest then repeat until the road has a thin veneer of stones.  Roll it flat by driving over it, then collapse in a heap.  Yes, all you people uselessly jogging around parks and expensively pounding treadmills, I have the perfect accommodation for you.  Shovel provided.

This recent onslaught of nature has cost me little but time and effort.  I have no doubt that Marcia will have cost many people much more.  Lend a hand to a neighbour when they need it.

My last post was whinging about the lack of rain and entitled “Be Careful What You Wish For”.  Well, I got it.  Between about midnight Sunday morning and 7 am, there was about 400 mm of rain.  I’m only guessing because I didn’t get to the rain gauge until 6 am and it was overflowing.  Between 6 am and 7 am there was a further 77 mm.  I am estimating on previous flood levels in the creek over the last 38 years, and the rainfalls recorded then.  On Sunday morning the creek was higher than I have ever seen it with debris deposited on the veranda at Blackbean Cottage. That has never happened before. I went down to the hydro past the waterfall booming and crashing with torrents of brown foaming water surging at perhaps 30 km/hr to see the damage and immediately saw the suspended roof had been washed away.  This means that the hydro had been more than 2 m under the raging floods.  The water was going down, but still too deep to see if the equipment was still there.  I also went to see the water pump, but but that was not visible either.

I went to the creek crossing and instead of the usual 50 mm of water by 5 m wide, it was about 1.8 m deep 40 m wide and doing perhaps 10 knots.  I had guests at both cottages, so went to give them both a situation report and advise them that the creek crossing was way too dangerous to attempt to drive or walk through.  I also assured them that as soon as the really heavy rain stopped, the creek would go down quickly.  An advantage of living at the top of a catchment area.

Then I had breakfast.  I had a crisis on my hands, but until the floods went down, there was nothing I could do.  The power was out, but until the roaring from the waterfall decreased from a 747 at take off, to a Fokker friendship, it would be risking life and limb to get out there.  About 3 hours later the hydro was revealed and was all there.  The chain I had put around the generator to augment the clamps and bolts actually held it all together.  The generator was stuffed with sand, leaves and rocks and jammed solid, but I scraped it out and threw heaps more water at it, until finally it would turn.  Here I would like to add an endorsement.  to Stamford UK, the makers of the generator.  This generator has not only been in 24/7 duty for 32 years, has not only been in the poorest service conditions imaginable at the bottom of a waterfall in a tropical rainforest, but has also been subjected to considerable abuse being swept away in floods, jammed up with sand and neglected for maintenance.  I have actually attempted to express my admiration to the manufactures at Stamford, but had some trouble tracking them down as they seem to be manufactured in China these days.  Way things are going now.

By late morning the creek had gone down considerably so I started trying to restore the power.  Penstock pipe stuffed with rocks, transmission lines broken, pipes disconnected and every hungry leech in the rainforest after a lengthy dry spell waiting to ambush me.  I first had to put up a temporary power pole as the roof that had served this function was well on its way to Innisfail.  Up and down the waterfall all morning letting some water through to flush out the pipes, change nozzles, reconnect the pipes when a connection blew out etc etc.  It was raining most of the time but I would have been drenched anyway as all the work was in the creek with water spraying every which way.  About the middle on the afternoon I had it all together and started the hydro at slow speed to spin some of the water out of the rotor and perhaps blow a bit out of the stator with the fan.  As I staggered out of the rainforest looking like a drowned rat and covered with mud and blood, I came across a couple of bewildered German tourists looking for signs of life and introduced myself as the receptionist and showed them round their cottage.  Stoical lot these Germans.  They did not once refer to the bedraggled state of ‘Mien Host’.  I left them with the veranda still covered with debris to make sure I could get the power on before nightfall.  I went down to the hydro and cranked it up to full speed and power.  I could tell as soon as I did it that the generator had once again taken the abuse and was outputting electricity.  If there had been no electrical output, there would be no load and it would spin at twice the design speed, the water jet would not be slowed by the turbine, and would make a hell of a racket as it hits the rear of the casing.  It did not.  Stamford, you beaut!  I’ll have to put the roof back sometime as it is not too clever to have electrical equipment in pouring rain, but next job next day was to survey the wreckage of the pump before we all run out of water.

There was a tangle of 3 inch steel pipes, but the pump hadn’t gone far, which isn’t surprising as it weighs so much.  One of the pipes had snapped and would have to be replaced, and the weir completely disappeared.  Just a row of folded-over star pickets to show where it had been.  In fact the bed of the creek had been re-sculptured so much that the new weir would have to be further upstream.  The top length of plastic pipe gone and a brand new ‘you beaut’ filter just a couple of weeks old went with it.  It had been tied to one of the star pickets, but that was gone too.

I spent the day recovering the bits that survived, wrestled the pump back to its pad, flushed things out, sqashed my pinkie between the pump and rock and generally had a really good time.  Today I went into Atherton to pick up the new steel pipe I had ordered.  They don’t put on threaded ends until you order it.  There is the slight problem of where to put a 3 inch diameter steel pipe weighing about 70 kg and 6.5 m long in or on a Nissen Navara.  Oh yes, and I also needed a 6 m length of 90 mm plastic pipe.  I leave it as an exercise for my dear readers to figure out how I did it.

This afternoon I bent the steel pipe to the right shape and connected all 26 m of it together.  Tomorrow the head works.

And this evening I discover that I may get more and similar floods this weekend.  Great.  I’m knackered already!  Give us a break!  I’m not the only one by any means doing this sort of repairs.  Malanda, just down the road had its worst floods since 1960.  Just down the road near the crater, someone lost a large dam.

I haven’t even got round to contemplating what to do about the bridge next to Blackbean Cottage being swept away or what to do with 4 km of road gullied, washed of gravel and roughened.  It is nearly all council gazetted road, but I am not expecting much before the sun turns into a red giant.

There is a chance that the worst flooding will be further north near Port Douglas and Mossman.  There the expected rains coincide with king tides which may back up the waters to produce coastal flooding.  They are filling sandbags as I type.  To my friends in these places, I know how you feel.  Hang in there, relax and just cope.  Nothing much else to do anyway.

 

 

 

What has happened to the ‘Wet’ this year.  It should be well and truly in swing by now, but the sun is blazing out of a blue sky again today.  No sign of a monsoon trough squatting over the peninsula with long periods of drenching rain.  I was hand slashing the vegetation along the road and down some tracks today (with a machete).  I spent nearly 3 hours in the rainforest and the leaves were crunching underfoot, with not a leech to be found.   The weather and lack of leeches has been good for my guests, but does not bode well for the future, both short and long term.  In the short term the creek is so low that the hydro system is teetering on the edge of shut-down again.  I already have the smallest nozzle fitted and down to about 1/4 full power, but I just checked the water flowing over the intake weir and by tomorrow that little trickle won’t be there and the machine will be sucking air and the power will crash further.  In the slightly longer term, if the ground water doesn’t build up soon, the next dry season may be even worse for creek flow.  In the long term, climate change may make this season the new normal, with longer dry seasons and difficult adjustments for agriculture, forestry, fisheries, tourism, biodiversity, endemic species survival, domestic water availability, fire regimes, disease control (eg dengue), and my ducks.  Ducks live a surprisingly long time and may live to see major changes, though I dare say they will not trouble to document it.

Is there anyone out there who still doubts that climate change is happening now and rapidly?  Apart from our elected government of course, who give a remarkable impersonation of the three wise monkeys.  Unfortunately, yes.  My own brother, not unacquainted with scientific matters, thinks it is still in the realm of ‘natural variation’ and not anthropomorphic.  Get real.  I love you still Peter despite this glaring flaw.  Mountains of data and evidence have now accumulated to show climate change is real, it is fast and coming to a corner store near you!  Actually it is coming to you.  Right now.  It is coming to our children like an avalanche.  My generation has been the most culpable in stealing from the future.  We have used up natural resources at a prodigious rate, we have overwhelmed the natural system’s capacity to absorb our wastes, we have trashed forests, degraded soils, depleted fossil water, driven fish to extinction, poisoned rivers, made the air almost unbreathable in large cities, and to top it off, we have signed the tab to our kids.  We have not left them a legacy, we have left them huge debts.  The financial system is now totally addicted to debt.  Borrowing from the future, lumbering the kids now playing on swings, with the hangover from our binges.

For anyone of a tender age, I’m thinking less than 30, you have been shafted.  Totally worked over and hung out to dry.  A rational response to this would be to go out and shoot anyone over 50.  I don’t advise this as the over 50’s still have great control over the military, police and just about any administration which has control of cash.  Don’t expect this to change any time soon.  In fact harming anyone is outside my personal ethics.  What you can do is to carve out a little hole in the economic system where you are under the radar and have control of your own economics.  I think I have managed this rather well in the last few decades.  Low cash flow, large rewards.