A new worry

I guess if you are not getting rain or if you are somewhere cold, the North Queensland obsessiveness about our rain could be getting a bit boring. In spite of that I just had to add one more thing.

At about 11 pm last night Mr Sunshine and I were about to go to bed and a funny thing happened in the toilet - in the toilet bowl to be exact. You know how, when you flush it, it is supposed to all disappear down the S bend. It didn't. The water from the cistern just emptied into the bowl and stayed there. In fact it looked like it was actually filling from below as well. Water was rising in the bowl. Do you know how scary that is late at night when you really want to unwind, go to sleep and not have to worry about waking up and finding that your bed is floating around in an indescribable smelly soup?

The good thing is that it was all pretty clear water. Not pretty as such, I mean fairly clear water.
You see this is a very flat city. It gives the civil engineers a big headache trying to get drainage right. Drainage only works if everything can run downhill. When you get lots and lots of rain, it confuses the drainage system. I think my junior science teacher said, "Water always finds its own level." When you syphon a fish tank you have to have the end of hose in the tank higher than the end out of the tank. Right? Transfer that logic to sewerage. The sewerage pipes are all well underground, but lately the ground water level from all of the rain is above ground - and we are trying to make the sewerage in the pipes run down lower than the surrounding ground water. You see the problem?

What to do? The bowel water (that was a typo, I meant "bowl" water, but the typo fits so well) level seemed to stop about 10 cm from the top so, (just in case) I got a collection of bathmats and placed them around the bowl to stop any overflow from escaping into the bedroom - I hoped. I worried, checked the weather bureau's radar maps of where the heaviest rainfalls were and went to bed. The rain had eased off at last.

In the nick of time, if you ask me.