Thread: Bit Wet in Kalgoorlie

We've had a couple of decent storms go through here in the past week or so - the best one so far was earlier today.

The young bloke's house lost a couple of sections of roof capping (corrugated fibro cement sheeting) in a strong wind storm a few days ago. As you can't buy this material any more, we have temporarily patched the hole with a stick-on silver building tape.

Earlier today, it belted down raining here, with reports of hail in some areas ....................

These two pics taken at our place - the gutters were struggling to handle the flow and a lot of the topsoil in from the back lawn ended up flowing through the back verandah (at least my shed stayed dry ).



So I thought we had better go around and check on the patchwork on the young bloke's roof (he's out at work on a remote minesite). When we got there, the street outside his place was completely under water - you could not even see the kerbs / driveways - water was flowing from the street into his front yard and the whole place resembled a lake with a house sticking out of it. Luckily, the house is on stumps with the floor level about 500mm above ground level at the front, and about 750mm at the back, so the water did not get up high enough to enter his house (the houses either side of his were not as lucky).

Water was banked up against his roller door, so I opened it up and there was then a river flowing down the side of his house through the carport and into the back yard, where it was again held up by the back gate until I could cut the chain (couldn't find the key to the padlock) and open the gate.





The next door neighbour moved his little Mazda ute out into the street and parked it in the deepest water to force the ******* in Land Cruisers to drive in either the centre of or on the other side of the road, rather than roar through the deepest section of water at a great rate of knots like a complete tosser trying to prove how big a splash they could make .................... while pushing waves of water up onto people's houses. Whenever it rains like this, it seems that these ****wits come out to play. One dickhead in a dunnydoor charged into the deep water and flooded his engine, stopping in the middle of a "lake". He managed to open his window and asked us all to come over and push his car out of the water ....................... and was promptly told to **** off. He was eventually helped out by the drivers of a couple of other vehicles which had been forced to stop behind him - buggered if he was getting any assistance from me.

I haven't had a look inside the games room and back shed / workshop yet. The water was banked up at least 250mm at the doors to those areas - but they are both concrete floors so should hopefully not be too bad. At least the "patchwork" that we did on the roof of the house the other day has stood up well and no water has gone into the house.

He has already been in contact with his insurance company after the ridge capping blew off, as it appears that the entire roof will have to be replaced - so hopefully they will come to the party and that will be done by a builder / roofing contractor. If not, I have got quotes for materials to replace everything in either galvanized iron or colorbond (not a lot of difference in price between the two) - and it is not as expensive as I thought it would be if we do it ourselves. Will see what the outcome of insurance assessment is.

In the meantime, I suppose I'll be around there tomorrow doing a bit of clean-up and making sure that shed / workshop / games room are OK and can dry out.

Originally Posted by Anita

On my birthday teh 9th we had 25mm here. Trees down and huge washouts. It was 36 hours without electricity and thank god there was little harm to humans.

Had no idea it gets so wet in Kalgoorlie!

The rain was such a shock that half a dozen primary school kids feinted, they had to be brought round by throwing a bucket of dust over them.
Belated birthday greetings.