Where is Noah when you need him?

This weekend, much of Victoria has been hit with wild weather, lots of rain, wind, and parts of the state have been flooded, including the north-east. Yesterday morning (Sat) I received an emergency message from the SES via text and landline message warning that the whole Ovens River catchment (in which Myrtleford is located) was on flood alert.

OK... so that made up my mind about NOT driving to Kyneton on Sun afternoon for a meeting on Monday. After that, the day passed like a fairly normal Saturday, with me pottering around, getting ready for Sunday worship, and then in the late evening (11pm, to be precise) I received another SMS from the SES, with instructions to "evacuate to high ground now". GREAT....

So I did all the right things, filled up some containers with water, in case the worst came to the worst, and gathered together all the bits and pieces I needed for an emergency, (torch, chocolate, bottle of gin, you know the kind of thing :-) just in case... and then checked out the Bureau Of Meteorology website to see what it had to say about flood warnings in this area. At this point I wasn't really alarmed, as my house is not particularly close to the river, and according to the BOM, the flood level was only at about 3.6m and steady, so I figured I would be ok.

Around midnight, I had a visit from my next door neighbour, who said he saw my light on, and wanted to check I was ok, and to reassure me that if I heard his car leaving it was NOT because he and the family were evacuating and leaving me behind, but rather that he was off to check on another friend who lived close to the river, to see if he needed help with anything. So he also reassured me that, since the SES had advised people in the town to evacuate to the senior citizens' hall (which is across the road from our houses), he figured that we would be pretty safe.

This morning I awoke to discover that I was still here, and had not floated away (and that my bed had not become a water bed overnight). However, there was a significant amount of water over many roads in town and just out of town, resulting in some people from church not being able to get into town for worship this morning (and boy, was I grateful that I only had to get to Myrtleford this morning for worship!)

This afternoon I had to go to a meeting in Beechworth, but as the Great Alpine Road heading towards Wangaratta was closed, I ended up going to Beechworth via Yackandandah (after I stopped laughing at the SES guy who suggested I go via Stanley. That road is scary enough in good conditions- no way was I going to risk it today!). The round trip was about 70-80km out of my way, but I got there and back in one piece, so I didn't really mind.

This afternoon, I took my camera out and about in town, and took some photos of the flooded roads etc (can't be bothered captioning them- check my Facebook profile, or ask me if you want more details). Enjoy! :-)