Happy Nice Mall

WEE WAA, Australia – Two years ago, the fields outside Christina Southwell’s family home near Australia’s cotton capital looked like a dusty brown desert as drought-induced bushfires burned to the north and south.

After record-breaking rains last week, muddy floodwaters surrounded him with the smell of rotting crops. He had been trapped with his cat for days, and he still didn’t know when the mud would recede.

“Looks like it’s taking a long time to get going,” he said as he watched a boat carrying food to Wee Waa town. “All it leaves behind is this smell and it’s going to get worse.”

Life on land in Australia has always been tough, but the last few years have hit extremes after another, demanding new levels of resilience and pointing to the rising costs of a warming planet. For many Australians, mild weather – a pleasant summer, a year without exceptions – increasingly feels like a luxury.

This Black Summer bushfires 2019 and 2020 were the worst in Australia’s recorded history. This year, many of the areas damaged by these epic blazes experienced the wettest and coldest November since at least 1900. Hundreds of people in various states had to evacuate. Many more, like Mrs. Southwell, were stranded on floodplain islands with no way to leave except by boat or helicopter, possibly until after Christmas.

And in the second year of the weather event known as La Nina In full swing, meteorologists predict even more flooding for Australia’s east coast, adding to the stress of the pandemic. Rural rat plague at biblical proportions.

“It feels constant,” said Brett Dickinson, 58, a wheat farmer who lives not far from Ms. Southwell in northwest New South Wales, about a six-hour drive from Sydney. “We are constantly fighting all elements and animals as well.”

There is a tendency to think of extremes like “natural disasters” or “works of God” that come and go with the news. But Australia’s nature nightmares are in flux. Although drought and flood are opposites of weather, they are driven by the same forces – some untimely, others more recent and human-induced.

Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Extreme Climates at the University of New South Wales, said the ups and downs of the air have been violent for thousands of years on the Australian landmass as large as the continent of the United States and surrounded by seas. Powerful oceans drive the climate, from the tropical South Pacific to the colder Southern Ocean off Antarctica.

As a result, El Niño and La Niña patterns tend to hit Australia more than any other place, with severe droughts resulting in massive flooding. Some scientists even suggest that marsupials even have a way of reproduction with the ability to activate. pregnancies on pauseshows that the El Niño-La Niña cycle has been long enough for flora and fauna to adapt.

On top of this already intense variability, Professor Pitman said there are now two additional complicating factors: “climate change and human decisions to build things.”

Both make fires and floods more harmful.

“A small change in climate coupled with a small change in landscape can have a huge impact on flood characteristics,” said Professor Pitman.

The results are already visible in government budgets. The cost of climate disasters in Australia More than double since the 1970s.

Ron Campbell, mayor of Narrabri Shire, which includes Wee Waa, said his district still awaits government payments to offset the damage from past disasters. He wondered when governments would stop paying for infrastructure repairs after every emergency.

“The costs are huge, not just here, but everywhere else in similar conditions,” he said.

More instinctively, the influence of an “overburdened climate” is drawn to the terrain itself. The effects of fire, drought and flood coexist in the vast farmland and small towns between Melbourne and Sydney, where most of the country’s food, cattle, wine and coal are produced.

Even in non-flammable areas, the heatwaves and lack of precipitation that preceded the wildfires claimed as many lives as the fire did. 60 percent of trees some places. Beef prices rose more than 50 percent as cattle farmers culled most of their herds during the drought and rushed to restock the heavy rain-fed (almost-dead) meadows.

Bryce Guest, a helicopter pilot in Narrabri, once watched dust bowls grow from above. Then “a monstrous rain,” he said, and a new type of business came: flights over mechanical pumps that push water from fields to irrigation dams in a last-ditch effort to protect crops headed for a record harvest.

On a recent flight, he pointed to mountains of stored grain — worth at least six figures — devastated by rains, with heavy equipment tucked and rusted beside them. Further inland, a house surrounded by embankments had become a small island accessible only by boat or helicopter.

“Australia is all about water – everything revolves around it,” he said. “Wherever you put your house, your stock. Everything.”

The flood plains, known as the Murray-Darling basin, stretch for hundreds of miles, unlike the terrain at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The region is so flat that the towns’ roads can be flooded with less than an inch of additional rain.

This happened a few weeks ago in Bedgerabong, a few hundred miles south of Narrabri. One afternoon recently, several teachers were driven out of town in a gigantic fire truck – equipment for one disaster often serving another. Across a flooded road behind them, three other teachers had decided to camp out to provide some consistency to children who had been out of school for months due to the pandemic.

Paul Faulkner, 55, the school’s principal (total enrollment: 42), said many parents want social connectivity for their children. The Red Cross has sent out booklets for those struggling with stress and anxiety.

“Covid has kept everyone away from their families,” he said. “This further isolates them.”

He admitted that there were a few things they did not discuss; Santa for one. The town is expected to be cut off until after the holidays, as the waters, rising by heavy rains in a few days, take weeks to dry and subside.

In Wee Waa, where the water began to recede, materials and people flowed in and out last week by helicopter and a small boat driven by volunteers.

Yet there was famine everywhere, most people. In a community of nearly 2,000 people, half of the teachers at the local public school were absent from work.

Tien On, owner of the town’s only pharmacy, struggled with an understaffed to keep up with requests. He was particularly concerned about delayed drug deliveries by helicopter for patients with mental health drugs.

Southwell, 69, was better prepared than most. He has spent 25 years volunteering in emergency rooms and has been teaching first aid for decades. After a short boat trip to Wee Waa, he returned home, patiently and with groceries, checking a kennel for the stray cats he had been feeding, and discovered that only one of his chickens appeared to have suffocated.

He said he wasn’t sure how much climate change could be blamed for the floods; his father had built his houses on higher piles, knowing that the waters would rise from time to time.

All he knew was that more extreme weather and serious difficulties for the community would come their way.

“The worst part is waiting,” he said. “And cleaning.”