We get a call to conserve water; okay, but because there's too much of it?

A couple of days ago it began to rain, and hard. Amiri noticed and jumped to his feet from the couch, raced into the kitchen, selected two clear, straight-sided water glasses and disappeared out on to the deck. He was planning to measure the rainfall we got. (two glasses allowed him to duplicate his measurement at slightly different spots for accuracy's sake, and also to collect twice as much rainwater.) Because of his schedule and other interests, he was not able to monitor his experiment quite as efficiently as the National Weather Service did, but he did collect somewhere in excess of 5 inches of rain between then and this morning. 

According to the weather service we have received 7.55 inches of rain since last Wednesday with 3.35 of that happening just last night.

Today, Saturday morning, Jeanne and I walked down to the Opanuku Stream to see how high it was and were impressed. Not only is it higher than we've seen before, it is browner than we've seen if before. We had umbrellas with us but we stayed dry during our 1 hour hike. 

Here is the Opanuku on a sunny day some time ago, in the course of a normally dry summer. You can see through the water to the algae, etc. The stream here measures about 2 meters wide at most .

This picture was taken from about the same spot on the bridge. Less zoom. The water now stretches 12 meters from bank to bank. 

A pretty good sized branch comes down. 

The dusk to dawn lights are still on at 11:15 a.m.

We have been getting daily requests in the newspapers and the on-line news to conserve water. At first, that seemed crazy since we clearly have too much of the stuff right now. But then they explained. 

You saw the condition of the water in the Opanuku. Well, that sort of sediment-laden water has been flooding into the reservoirs and putting extra stress on the water-treatment plants that produce about 450 million liters of water a day for Auckland. They want the usage to drop to 400 million liters because of the extra work they must put into cleaning up the water to normal standards. If we don't decrease usage, and demand overrides the systems capabilities, they'll have to do the best they can but issue a boil alert. What a hassle that would be. The next thing we'd have would be brown-outs as 1.4 million people put pots of water on the stove. 

The rain, fortunately, seems to be slowing down. We had only two downpours today totalling about half an hour. Tomorrow is supposed to ease up a little more and by Tuesday, we might see some sun again. 

I read that several hundred homes have had some flooding.. New Lynn had a sink hole open up. Our area is so hilly and well-drained that we have had no issues whatsoever with flooding.  -djf

Update: I'm actually posting this several days after these photos were taken. The sun has returned. I read that usage has been reduced to about 409 million liters per day, but the treatment problem persists and so do the calls to conserve. We're doing our part.