May

Hiya again
It was "thinking about raining" as I waited for the bus at the Oban supermarkets yesterday afternoon and I had time to study the attractions (or lack thereof) in that place.
The knotweed-infested banks of the Black Lynn,...
... the rubbish ...... the bridge that has to carry one bus after the other and looks like its railings have been beyond collapsing for years -- it's not a very attractive place at all. Shame...
Still, the mallards seem to be content enough:Cheerioh!

Two days after the flood -- looking back...

Hello again
I needed a day to recover from the excitement of the flood, and then I had to get some work done and attend a lovely chamber concert last night here in Oban, so it's been a couple of days.
Here are a few more pix of the flooding and of the trash that's come down on the torrent.
A couple of views from my garden shed:No, I wasn't all that shaken, but the wind was tearing at the shed (and I'm still learning to use my camera properly). Still, I like the colours here. Not sure yet what the damage to the lawnmower is.
The wind and the water conspired to overturn our almost-empty wheeliebins (trash containers; each household has its own and they are all supposed to congregate in friendly agglutinations inside the so-called bin enclosures):The gunk that came out of those bins, and the smell, were unspeakable.
And I think we could all have done without these water features at the bottom of our gardens:If you click on the photo above, you will see a metal fence set into the stone wall. It was making ominous creaking sounds as I was taking that photo, and I was truly afraid the pressure of all the debris behind it, and a foot of water, was going to breach the fence -- a solid, heavy-duty corrugated steel fence with sturdy verticals and strong horizontals. It didn't yield but it has a noticeable bent in it where one of the verticals gave way by about an inch.
A dozen yards downstream, the "burn" called the Black Lynn disappears into a culvert beneath a car park:There wasn't much clearance on Saturday...
The day after, the Black Lynn flowed much calmer and clear-watered within its designated concrete trough, but there was a lot of mysterious-looking debris caught upstream of the footbridge, like this plank with beautifully rounded edges that sticks out of a tangle of branches and twigs and plain junk. Was it once a bench?Or this yellow unidentifiable object:
From my kitchen window, I could see a long piece of roundwood, probably an unused telegraph pole, lying across the cleared patch of what used to be "my" wilderness and should be a Community Garden come spring. This morning the "Garden Brigade" turned up in their reflecting overalls to clear some of the debris and junk that has washed up and got stuck in the burn upstream from the wee footbridge. It's quite a collection, some of it still useable:It was a gloriously sunshiny day until, quite suddenly, at about four pm, we had a flurry of wet snow. It only lasted a few minutes, but was a taste of winter a bit on the early side for everyone. Still, my Iona nasturtiums are doing ok: TTFN and be well. Peace!

... and the biggest flood so far

Hiya
We live in interesting times.
It has just stopped raining after hours of relentless, heavy rain. Major flooding all over the Oban area.
Our gardens are flooded and so is my shed - we'll see what the lawnmower has to say about that once it's dried out, whenever that may be.
Pix taken about an hour ago -- it's much worse now.
The metal fence in the stone wall has lots of debris blocked up upstream and there's a waterfall about knee-high. I am concerned it will give and there will be a rush of water flooding downstream, i.e. buildings in the Nelson Road area.
Back soon -- I'm going out to buy wellies. Borrowed my neighbour's to evacuate stuff from my shed.

... and another, much bigger flood event on Oct 23...

Well, it was to be expected, wasn't it, what with all the rain coming this way from across the Atlantic and us being so close to the sea with mountains behind, so this "orographic" rainfall is chundering down on us. Fascinating to a newbie like myself as the rain here is so very different from the rain in Bern, Switzerland. Not cold, not harsh, except when it's driven into your face by a strong gust...
Anyway, I woke very early this morning and took this photo (just before 5AM):
My new camera has come in handy as it can compensate for lack of lighting, at least up to a point. I am still learning to use it, so some of the colours are not right.
In the daylight, the view was even starker -- this is from my kitchen window, taken at about 11AM:By about 12:40PM, the water had receded a bit, not because the rain had let up but because the fence that runs at a right angle from the stream has given way in one strategic point, which allows some of the overflow to take the straight course across the lane, through the metal fence and into the car park beyond.
Elsewhere, too, there were floods -- the road from Glasgow to Oban was flooded in many places, making for dangerous travel, and locally some car parks had geysers in them:
And today, we have sun, hail, wind, calm, rain -- everything in quick succession, making for some stunning views:

The burn has flooded

Hiya again

It's been raining really hard for a day and a night. I woke up just after six this morning to find the Black Lynn, the burn at the bottom of our garden, having risen above its banks and inching up towards our garden fence.
As I type these lines (ca. 08:30am), about one third of the recently-cleared wilderness is flooded but the waters are receding. There's a distinct whiff of human excrement in the air, so the rumour that raw sewage goes straight into the burn is probably true.
My neighbours have told me floods like this happen on a regular basis.
I can only say that someone made a big mistake when they "renovated" the burn crossing by simply putting a concrete slab down where, from the looks of the stone wall, there once was a small arched bridge. This means that clearance is at least twenty to twenty-five centimetres (about ten inches) less than before. What's more, two culverts run below the slab, further reducing clearance, the lower one skimming the surface of the water even on a good day: I took the above and the next two photos two days before the first flood I've witnessed here:
The burn on a good day, with a pair of mallards enjoying the newly-cleared watercourse.
Until recently, the riverbed was chock full of litter: wooden planks, broken scooters, rope, plastic bottles, a traffic cone, an old tyre, some rusting box-like thing that may once have been an oven -- see for yourself:Above, the low-lying culvert blocking the flow of debris and rubbish -- maybe a good thing but it's a flood event just waiting to happen; below, a look upstream from the same vantage point (photos taken Aug 4, 2008):

Some photos now to document the beginnings of the flood event before dawn, the cusp and the receding of the waters.
I started taking photos at 06:17, as the water was beginning to creep across the lane that crosses the burn: By 06:50, the water was flowing right across the lane (above) , after which it began to fill the lane itself: The water creeping up the lane (07:03; above), filling the newly-cleared "community garden", and rushing down the car park, … … covering much of it by 07:25:The maximum was reached just before 07:30, which is when the water reached the top of the lane and the "feet" of my garden shed (water damage was not serious, but I wonder what the next flood will bring).
07:38 (above) and 07:40 (below)
The water began to recede about an hour after the maximum.
At 08:22 the burn continues to rush along its concrete trough. Above the bridge, it still spreads out into the newly-cleared "community garden" . I observed quite a few people walking down the lane from across the stream and having to turn back to take the long way around. By 09:27, the lane has become passable again……and by 2:33pm, the water has actually receded to below the level at which I started photographing the event:
What I didn't photograph (I did have some work to do, actually) was the mallards that moved in about two hours after maximum level. They had a ball swimming about the new "lake" and scoffing up the nutritious worms etc that were washed up.