This is like the me too of fire disasters. Hitting the town that ... never really delivered on the fire disaster movie. Which is odd coz they love the genre, & they live in an area prone to wildfire ...

Finally, it's like the movie comes to them.

On a globo-weather-level, it couldn't be further from the reality here, where the rain has been incessant for several years. It demonstrates that there are still cycles of dry & wet unfolding simultaneously. Observation indicates they are getting more extreme at either end of the spectrum.

At some point there will be the flip-arooney. Places that are now wet, will go dry-cycle ... & vice versa ... almost certainly to extreme degrees. I think/hope that point might be this year.

Since you posted, these fires have grown many fold. One thing that strikes me about this is the ease and rapidity with which tens of billions of dollars, maybe more, has been wiped out. Not to suggest that the monetary value of the 'event' compares to the human suffering (though few will shed tears for those who can afford multi-million dollar homes), but the fact is that this will have pretty profound economic consequences for the country in the form of increased costs of insurance, if it is even available, and that will further push up the price of homes.

And the government will respond by: 1) throwing a lifeline to the insurance industry while letting people fend for themselves when it comes to housing, and 2) printing more money to cover the cost of bailing out the insurance/banking bros.

This will result in even more inflation.

So even though on the face of things this may look like a bunch of rich folks taking a hit, no, that hit will be put on us.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else. That really is the American system.

(T)his will have profound economic consequences for the country in the form of increased costs of insurance, if it is even available, and that will further push up the price of homes.

(E)ven though on the face of things this may look like a bunch of rich folks taking a hit, no, that hit will be put on us.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else. That really is the American system.

No doubt. That's the way it always seems to go. Covid was another classic example - record profits for corporations (& corrupt scientists that caused/covered-up Covid) - a cost of living crisis for everyone else.

As an ex-firefighter, i'm curious as to how it managed to burn so far into populated areas. If it's in forest & the wind is up, there's not a lot you can do. Ideally, you'd be looking at the weather forecast & backburning where you can before it arrives, then waterbombing the homes like crazy. I understand the conditions were extreme, but '12 000 structures damaged or destroyed' - you'd be hoping to limit the damage to way less than that.

Always thought it possible that a cyclone could landfall this far south (seen them at the same latitude but out to sea), & now it's come to pass. Turns out it's not unprecedented - there was one that did it in 1974 - Cyclone Zoe.

Cyclone Albo is way south of where it's meant to be, now it's stalled & stubbornly predicted to head in a contrary direction to classic re-curvature forces - straight into Brisbane.

It's only Cat 2, but it's a large sprawling shape-shifting beast, in an area that's not used to cyclones (it's used to East Coast Lows, which can have as much or more rain, but not the wind).
There's enormous local media hype (compared to almost nothing before the ECL floods of 22) - i tend to think it's over the top - but it does feel very typhoony.

Typical eminent arrival weather - wind gusting up - dying down - heavy rain dumps - then even a glimpse of sunshine.

Biggest concern is the rain. As it's a slow moving system, it's a multi-day event. We've already had 200mm (Thur evening) & it's not due to make landfall until Friday night/Sat morning. It could be a 1000mm by the time it's done. That's not good.

Similar to the 22 ECL floods, Northern Rivers is right in the clockwise firing line for the rain torrent bands if/when it's a Brisbane eye entry. NR is situated 100km south of Brisbane.

We're like the Pingtung west coast for typhoons in Taiwan - a rain-absorption landmass.

On the positive side, it's kinda cool to get that old typhoon feeling back again ... got my Taiwan scooter wet-gear on, out there doing the prep ...

* Alfred was supposed to be called Anthony - but that name was skipped over as it's the same name as Aus PM Anthony 'Albo' Albanese - same as what they did with Xi Jinping when naming Covid viruses. But locally, people refer to this event as Cyclone Albo.

As you can see, it's no monster storm - Cat 2, due to downgrade to cat-1. It is typhoony - wind gusting up then dying down - but probably not much more than 60-70kph at this stage. Couple of saplings down but no major trees so far. Power went out at 8am this morning.

Rain is the major concern. The creek is flooding, but not at 22 levels yet. All depends on where the bands feed into. We're currently in the firing line of a middle-band, but it's loosely structured so there might be a significant gap between this & the inner-band.

Where the inner band feeds into will be important - hopefully it's not right here - as it's the inner-band is tighter, it might contract further towards the eye, which is further north. I hope so.

Once the eye crosses, i'm hopeful that it will be all over.

As is normal, the biggest rain is to the south of eye - right where i am. We're over 250 mm so far - anything more than that & it starts to get problematic. We could handle another 100, but not another 500+, which is quite possible.

I'm in Nimbin, which is about 30km due west from Cape Byron.

The eye finally made landfall, just north of Brisbane. Probably the biggest event was the media circus ... & the utilities failure - the actual storm was drawn out, but not terribly significant.

It was hyped as the first categorized cyclone to make landfall so far south since Zoe in 1974, but something you won't read in the papers is that it actually dropped to Cat-0 just before it made landfall on the mainland - though it did hit some outlying islands (Bribie) as a Cat-1 - so maybe it still counts. Not to say that Tropical Storms can't cause major rain issues (Morakot was a TS for most of it's journey through Taiwan) but that was not the case in this instance.

Re the Cyclone Albo metaphor - it fits pretty well: weak, over-hyped, but still causes widespread damage.

What it did re-expose, on a grander-scale, was the ridiculous fragility of Aus's utility infrastructure. Really, the winds, when it was gusting, were no more than 50-60km - the odd gust going to 70 - but with lots of lull time in between where it was almost dead calm. Somehow that resulted in this statement from the privatized energy provider:

It could take as long as two weeks to restore power to the more than 290,000 homes and businesses across south east Queensland that are currently in the dark.

That 290k is just Queensland - there'd be as many if not more outages in NSW - so 600k odd power outages caused by a Cat-0 cyclone, that didn't cause major flooding? FFS, send a working party to Taiwan to work out how they get through Cat-2-3s without any power outage. Even with Cat-5s it's usually back on within 12 hours.

With the power outage comes internet outage. I don't remember the internet going out ever in Taiwan even in Cat-5s or major earthquakes. You can never get a straight answer if you inquire what the actual problem is - it's always cause: unknown - expected time of restoration: unknown - but i spoke to a senior energy worker & he said they are reliant on the electricity grid to power the machinery at the antennae. Surely you would have a back-up generator for that! Or hey, there's this thing called solar energy now, & batteries ...

Even that doesn't fully explain it coz many times the power has been back on but the internet is still out. Which makes me think they decrease or boost certain signals for certain areas - but that's only uninformed speculation - coz there is no information to the exact cause. Why is there zero information? You have to assume there's a dirty secret somewhere under that info suppression MO.

Anyway, it's made what was already abundantly clear, even more abundantly clearer - you can't live in Aus & rely on private utility companies (charging the most exorbitant prices in the world) to reliably deliver - it doesn't fit the short-term profit model. Luckily, there are work-arounds now. It's an expense that i really don't need right now, but i'm gonna vote with my feet on Monday.

In additions to the 290k outages in Qld, below is the outage map for NSW. So from a Cat-0 storm, wind damage alone caused 600k outages from north of Brisbane (Qld) to Port MacQuarie NSW - a distance of 600+km. That's like a TS eye hitting Taipei & causing simultaneous outages in Okinawa.