As I write this, the skies are black, the thunder is shaking the windows and the rain is pouring down. Another summer thunderstorm has hit the city with up to 38mm falling within an hour. No doubt the emergency calls to SES will soon follow.

Sydney has endured a continuous series of storms which began on 4 December when a large hailstorm hit Blacktown in the outer west. Thousands of roofs were destroyed and some streets did not have an undamaged house. With the huge amount of work to be done and the upcoming Xmas holidays, few of the houses were fixed immediately and Blacktown was subsequently hit by another windstorm (which damaged many of the tarps) and further rainstorms. throughout December and January. I have now been to Blacktown more times in the last 2 months than in my whole life.

Last week it was the turn of Bankstown and Liverpool, high winds and hail brought down trees, damaged roofs and soaked the ground to capacity. When record downpours fell the following week, there was widespread flooding, some road closure and a few evacuations. The rain stopped just before the George River overflowed and river levels dropped to safe by the end of the day.

With the rain we are having now, the poor people of Blacktown will be enduring more leaking roofs and soggy yards. Just another summer in Sydney.

I have just finished reading two books by Nick McCamley about bunkers and underground factories. Secret Underground Cities covers the history of the large underground military facilities that were built in England during WWII. I have visited the facility at Monkton Farleigh and once stayed in a house in Chislehurst that had an entrance to one of these facilities in its back garden. The book shows how largely these facilities were failures and cost huge amounts of money, often 20 times the original estimates. If nothing else it is a good study of poor project management. The book is not just dry history and contains the occasional anecdote. I particularly the story of the workers who clocked on when going underground, clocked off when they came to the surface, and were paid for the hours in between. Little did the timekeeper know, but some of these men had found another exit and were sneaking of to a second job for most of the day. Read the rest of this entry »