Simon Butcher

This morning the sky was nice and clear, and very still. By 9:30am the sky was dark as night, littered with lightning. The contrast between the clear sky and the cloud was quite defined; there was a definite and clearly visible edge to the front. With darkness rolling overhead, I joked about it being the end of the world, which our network engineer briefly found amusing until his face suddenly changed mid-laugh — which I can only assume was the moment a troublesome religious thought popped into his head — and he rushed off to phone his wife without so much as a word to us.

Then the rain started.

Actually, “started” isn't the right word; the rain switched on, with enough force to start ripping leaves and the occasional branch off trees. I call this “binary rain”, since it's either not raining or it's utterly torrential. It oscillated between rain and hail for a while, with each transition producing heavier rain and larger hail.

A few months ago they started to remove all of the trees behind the building to build a car park for the nearby European School, and the rain took care of what was left of the top soil, and started washing it downhill into our building's basement. The building, built on the cheap by Chrysler on swamp land, tends to flood a little at least once a year, but this was a little excessive.

With the basement flooding, and business continuity being an IT job (with often unusual consequences), we were no longer laughing. We were wet instead.

Clearly the sump of the building had become clogged with grit from all of the previous floods, and the drainage was completely useless. Considering the idiots outside in the street were driving through about two-feet of water, the whole area wasn't likely to drain quickly either.

Most of the day was spent sweeping water away from the high voltage switchboard and our diesel genset with the team (a serious health and safety violation), and a few volunteers from other departments, who later were reprimanded for helping — clearly it's an IT issue!

Some idiot called the fire brigade to hire a pump (like they didn't have enough on their hands) who fortunately never wasted their time to turn up, while we were using boxes of unused printed marketing material as make-shift sandbags. Sorry Tom.

The only member of the team who didn't really pitch in immediately was the aforementioned network engineer, who eventually appeared down in the basement having clearly searched the building for plastic bags and elastic bands to protect his shoes! It was very fashionable of you…

I didn't take any footage of the storm, but there's lots of footage on YouTube. It just goes to show that there's a lot more to IT than information or technology. It's one of those love-hate things.

So, what's going on with the weather? Last week Pukkelpop was inundated, to the extent that there were even deaths. I know La Niña has a lot to do with the weird weather in Australia, but what's gone wrong over here? Since the crazy winter, people have been moaning about the Gulf Stream slowing down, but nobody really seems to know.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: it turns out that the old shoes aren't so waterproof after-all, and the remainder of the afternoon was spent squelching around the office.

The photos here were taken after the worst was over by Matz Nilsson, who has taken up photography a lot more than I have recently. These aren't very good examples of his work though as they were taken for insurance purposes only.