The Wet is here

After a very hesitant start, the wet season has finally come to Possum Valley in the last week.  Before that was only fitfull little showers of no more that 58mm in a day.  In much of Australia farmers would rush onto the tractor and plant a crop on the strength of that, but up here in the wet tropics it passes pretty well unnoticed.  But this last week a genuine monsoon trough has been squatting on the top of Oz.  A couple of weak cyclones have been been dodging back and forth along the trough without doing much damage.

Down here on the fungus farm of Possum Valley, it meant that the hydro system went from half power from lack of water in the creek, to having no power as there was too much water in the creek.  Down at the hydro at the bottom of a water fall, the tail-waters rise, and the turbine trying to do 450 RPM gets bogged.  I don’t have to do anything, it just shuts itself down.  And I don’t have to do anything to start it up again.  As the water level drops, it just starts producing power again.  There is a battery bank that does the heavy lifting when there is no power input and I think it would last a few days with zero input, but I have never put it to the test.  So the guests enjoy uninterrupted electrical service even though the input is off and on. When there is a monsoon trough , the solar panels are doing nothing under the heavy clouds.  They can’t even remember why they were invented or what the sun looks like.  I can always patch in a stand-by generator if all else fails.  The power system here is more reliable than the mains, because of the hybrid system and the alternative options available.

Being at the top of the catchment, the floods come and go very quickly with the creek level dropping down an hour or two after the downpour.

Heavy rain also carves channels in the roads and washes the gravel off.  That requires money and labour to fix.  An inconvenience and an expense.  But the other extreme of no rain and no water is so much more devastating as it grinds huge areas of Australia and the world to dust.  The middle east, northern China, much of Africa, western America and other places will attest to the fact that drought is the curse, and rain the blessing.

I am fortunate that my guests who arrived today, having to wade through the creek to test the depth for driving through, seem to agree with me and are making the best of this very wet moment.