Kanjini News

15th April 2018

Extreme Rainfall Event - Lake-Side

Just before Easter (27 / 28th March) we had what was the most intense rainfall event in recorded history for the Clohesy River / Davies Creek and Emerald Creek catchments.
There were recordings of over 400mm of rain in 24 hours and the official rain gauge was flooded or knocked over by the Clohesy river flooding.
Dozens of farms lost their irrigation pumps, many houses got badly flooded (including Svargo's) and even the very high Davies creek bridge went under and needed significant repairs.

At Kanjini we lost the electric pump supplying the houses,
Our internal roads suffered wash-outs and landslides and piles of trees and debris blocked the roads along the creek, all of which took a fair bit of chainsaw and tractor work to remedy and make tracks passable again.
Considering the amount of rain we got in such a short time, most of our tracks handled it fairly well. Specially all the subdivision tracks, there was only one which had an un-passable wash-out.

And the other good news is that our big lake handled the extra water really well.
As you can see below, the lake was strongly overflowing already in early March, but then in the night form the 27th to the 28th March, our 25 acre lake rose by about 1.5 to 2 meters above normal full level, so there were like about 200 million litres of extra water in it at its peak!!!

The marquee area and overflow were a torrent which took our couches away. My estimate is that there were up to 150 million litres of water per hour flowing over the spillway, thats a lot of water!!!

Pauli standing in the overflow a few days after the huge deluge. You can see from the washed out rock on the right that the water was rushing through here at least neck-deep.
The marquee area the day after the first big rain event in early March. The water is still at its highest level, about 30cm above the lake being full.	The same area (from further back) a few days after the big dounpour. The water is gone down again by over 1.5m and the couches are gone. The water was up to the two pumps in the middle of the picture and flooded the small red fire-fighter pump.
Looking out from under the tarp during a heavy downpour showing the bunds and drain (white	Looking down a drain which is working very well.

As you can see the drainage work done as part of the lake-side landscaping is working very well and even in the heaviest down-pour we had no washouts to this newly landscaped area.

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