FLOODS

Sarah Larsen, reporter

First came the storms. Wind strong enough to uproot trees and throw this ship onto a beach. There was also the rain, which kept coming and coming. It turned streets into canals, washed away cars and ruined buildings. Then the Hunter River burst its banks, drowning farms and leaving towns and animals surrounded by water.

This is Newcastle. It's 170km north of Sydney at the mouth of the Hunter River.  The city and nearby towns were hit by floods which caused millions of dollars worth of damage. 9 people were killed

NEWS REPORT:

So what is a flood? And how can water cause so much destruction?

The most common sort of flood, like the one, that affected Newcastle, is caused by rain - too much rain over too little time.

REPORTER: When it rains, soil acts like a sponge - it soaks up the water at the start but then it gets saturated and the water flows straight off. In cities it happens much quicker because hard surfaces cover a lot of that absorbent soil.

That's why most cities have storm water drains that carry water away... but if they get too full they overflow.

Rivers and streams are nature's way of collecting and moving water.... but if there's more rain than usual rivers can burst their banks and flood surrounding areas.

The area around Newcastle is a flood plain - it has lots of lakes, rivers and creeks and it's flooded before. But people still choose to live there - flood plains make good farmland.

BARRY MEAD, FARMER: It's me livelihood. If we didn't have the river to pump out of it, we wouldn't be able to grow the vegetables that we have grown over the years.

Things called levees are built along the Hunter River to protect some towns - they're walls built along riverbanks to hold in the water. There were worries last week that the Hunter's levee would overflow. Thousands of people were evacuated. But luckily the levees were high enough and homes were saved.

STORM RECOVERY

Catherine Ellis, reporter

Now as we've just heard, one of the big jobs after a flood is cleaning up the mess, so things can get back to normal. To find out how that happens we sent Catherine into a disaster area.

"I've lived in this area for 20 years and I definitely haven't seen anything like this before".

"There was a jet ski going in our street to get people out of their house cos there was so much water".

"It was unbelievable you couldn't imagine anything like it".

"It was pretty scary actually... because I've never been in a flood before".

CATHERINE ELLIS, REPORTER: To see how big these floods were you really have to take to the skies.

So this is how my journey began. The State Emergency Service took me up in their helicopter and the pilot Steve showed me that even days after the rain had stopped, there was still a lot of water around.

CATHERINE: That's the New England Highway?

STEVE FORGACS, PILOT: Yep that's the start of it yeah.

There were homes totally isolated - many animals were stranded and some had died.

And lots of farmers' crops were under water.

Thankfully the SES has been there to help people.

CATHERINE: The back of this helicopter was actually filled with food and water and lots of supplies this morning, which they were taking around to all the people who are isolated.

The SES has also been taking supplies to people by boat.

I jumped on one to visit a little town called Hinton, which was surrounded by water.

Lots of the local kids were around because they couldn't go to school.

ABBY: Well no teachers could get here so they called it off.

Dillan showed me his horse, which he had left in a peculiar spot.

CATHERINE: How come he's tied up on the side of the road?

DILLAN: Because it was flooded in the paddock that we had him in.

Because of the floods lots of unwanted guests have been crawling into Hinton.

CATHERINE: What do you guys have here?

RICKY: We found a snake.

CATHERINE: ooooooow!

RICKY: It was washed up over on the other side of the bridge.

CATHERINE: That's disgusting!

At least it was dead!

After waving goodbye, I traveled to the coastal town of Newcastle.

The water that had been this high during the storm had all drained away but had left behind a big mess.

Just days earlier this main road had been a gushing river but was now covered in people's ruined belongings.

Nine-year-old Taylah has had to stay in a hotel because her home was totally saturated.

But despite the big mess and very long blackouts, everyone's been looking after each other.

BRONTE: Over the road they had a gas stove and they cooked pancakes for us.

SAM: I met my neighbours because they came across because they had no power.

MELISSA: I've been helping my dad at his work rip up carpet.

Molly, Bronte and Melissa are among 3000 school kids from the area who were supposed to be performing in a musical spectacular last week but the entertainment centre was flooded.

MOLLY: It was really devastating when we heard the news because we were looking forward to this, putting all the practices in.

But everyone's been helping clean up in the hope the show can go ahead in August.

Over at the home of the Newcastle Knights rugby league team, it's a similar story; the juniors have been helping out, after the storm tore the roof off the Admin building.

TYNE OWN: Everything just got washed away and blown away.

CATHERINE: How far away did it end up?

TYNE: Ah I think in the car park over there.

The storm was so wild it even caused a coal ship to get washed up at Newcastle's main beach!

CATHERINE: It's attracted hundreds of visitors each day and many people don't want to see it go.

"It's pretty awesome!"

"I'd like to have my birthday on it!"

"A ship playground so kids could go on it".

If it stays though, it could leak diesel into the ocean, which would hurt the environment, so it will have to be moved.

But in the meantime, it's providing a nice distraction for the thousands of people affected by the storms.

DROUGHT

Sarah Larsen, reporter

After seeing all that water, it's hard to believe most of Australia is still feeling the effects of a long-term drought...  Sarah visited a family to see how they were coping with the big dry.

CHLOE: This used to be full of water but now it's just dry like everything else.

SARAH LARSEN, REPORTER: In a normal year Chloe and I would be knee deep in water at this time of year, but it's been a long time since anything was normal for her family and a lot of other farmers.

It's been more than five years since there was any water in this soak on her family's dairy farm and she's worried it could be dry even longer.

Chloe's dairy farm is near the Coorong at the bottom of the River Murray. It might look like green but it's dry and desperate.

CHLOE: It's been really tough, really really tough. It's been dry, we haven't been able to do anything. Mum can't take me away to do the things that i want to do in town.

In a way the early rain made things worse. Lots of farmers borrowed money to buy seed and fertiliser because they expected a good crop.  They're now worried that nothing will grow and they'll have nothing to sell. That will mean they can't pay back their loans and they might have to sell their homes.

That's already been happening around Chloe.

Chloe: when I was at kindy we used to have a big huge yellow school bus that used to come along here and now there 6 or 7 that go on a tiny little white school bus and all these families have had to up and leave in the last few years.

Her mum Cindy is having to sell cattle because they can't afford to feed them.

CINDY: The feed has just gone up so much three or four years ago you could buy a bale of oaten hay for 30 dollars now we're looking at 150 dollars. its just gone up too much.

All types of farmers are being affected. Sheep and cattle are being sold in the thousands. Crops like wheat are also being devastated.

Will it get better? Well nobody is sure.

REPORTER:  Some scientists say this is an effect of climate change and Australia could be this dry all the time in the future and they reckon we shouldn't even be calling it a drought any more.

That's a scary thought. It could mean drastic changes like having to stop farming in some areas.

But that would affect hundreds of thousands of jobs.

For the time being the Federal Government is giving farmers money to help. That will help them pay their bill and feed their animals.

CHLOE: It's hard though because people in towns turn around and say we complain a lot.  A lot of people say that. When they can just close the doors on their business if it crashes and they have a home to go to whereas if our business crashes we have to move away to another house and that upsets me.

REPORTER: Could you imagine living anywhere else?

CHLOE: No, because I really love it here so much.

EARTHQUAKES

Nathan Bazley, reporter

Good luck to Chloe and her mum....

Now some areas in the world seem to have a lot of natural disasters. 

Indonesia in particular has been rocked by some pretty severe earthquakes.  I thought I'd find out why that country is so much at risk... and how it could affect us here.

Natural disasters don't come any worse than this.

Earthquakes are some of the most dangerous forces on our planet. Not only do they rock the surface of the earth with amazing ferocity, they often trigger other disasters like avalanches, landslides building collapses and of course tsunamis.

Scientists estimate there are over 3 million earthquakes every year!  That's about 8000 a day... or one every 11 seconds!!

But if there are that many happening why isn't there more destruction?

Well not all earthquakes are massive only about 100 a year actually do any harm.

The rest are just slight rumbles and are hardly felt at all.

NATHAN BAZLEY: The way we measure quakes is with one of these  - a seismograph. This needle tracks around this paper 24 hours a day and if there's any vibration in the earth it records it.

Anything from this.... to this....

Of course scientists can work out the difference between a quake and me!

DAVID LOVE, EARTHQUAKE EXPERT: Well this is a big earthquake that happened in Indonesia the other day. As you can see it shook the globe for some hours, certainly bigger than we recorded with the seismograph today.

But Earthquakes don't happen everywhere in the world.

This is where they hit most often.

You can see all the action happens on lines that join together they're called fault lines

You see the Earth isn't just a big lump of rock.

Its crust is actually made up of 16 big pieces and other smaller pieces called tectonic plates.

A bit like these pieces floating in a pool, the tectonic plates float on top of hot liquid, called magma, the same stuff that comes out of volcanoes.

NATHAN BAZLEY: Fault lines are where the tectonic plates join together but because the plates are floating they move. They sometimes push into each other or rub together, that's when you get a quake.

When that happens the earth's surface can be pushed up like this that can create new islands like this one that appeared after an Indonesian quake three years ago.

That sort of radical movement also caused a tsunami, which caused a huge amount of destruction and loss of life.

Australia doesn't have a faultline going through it... so we don't get many earthquakes... but that doesn't mean we're entirely safe...

The last big earthquake here was in Newcastle in 1989. 13 people were killed and 160 hurt. The damage bill has been estimated at around 4 billion dollars...

The band Silverchair wrote a song called 'faultline' because Daniel Johns lost a mate in the Newcastle quake.

Scientists are working hard to learn more about earthquakes... Each one is measured, studied and recorded by geologists all over the world...

Despite all the research they still haven't come up with a system to predict quakes.

But because there's been a few around Indonesia recently they're worried that another big one will hit there soon ... but they say that could be in 30 years... or 30 seconds...there's no way of telling for sure.

Stay safe until next time.... Bye for now..