Potholes

That's not a pothole.

That's a pothole....

(Evanslea Road Mt Tyson - near Toowoomba - yesterday).
Photo courtesy Toowoomba Chronicle.

Murphy's Law

Congestion on the range.

I've begun to appreciate the knock-on effects of the mad weather since spending the last three days in Brisbane.

It's only been the last three days that Brisbane has been accessible from Toowoomba. Since last Tuesday, the Warrego has been closed. There were landslides on the range, flooding at the Western end at Withcott, and also halfway to Brisbane at Glenore Grove, and closer to Ipswich at Goodna.

The final barrier was inundation around Rocklea. It went down on Saturday night. 

Travelling to Brisbane on Sunday, the road was better than I had expected, as Main Roads has very sensibly used the period of closure to resurface long sections, particularly between Helidon and Withcott. The left lanes on this part of the road were in a dangerous state and plenty of people who were either careless or couldn't be bothered slowing down have learned the hard way about the weaknesses of stylish low profile tyres in combination with alloy wheels.

I've been talking to a few tyre repairers lately, but more of that later.

The alloys are strong, but you can't bash them back into shape in the same way you can steelies. Much of this section is repaired, but still has an 80 kph limit. You'd be stupid to drive any faster.

Large sections of countryside especially around Withcott and Helidon have been inundated, and whilst I know this road like the back of my hand, there were times I lost track of where I was because of how much of the landscape has been altered.

I was on the road to Brisbane because I was helping my son and daughter shift house. The floods have put a meataxe through their plans.

Flooded rubbish at Yeronga.

Together with two other students they had been leasing a place in Yeronga which they were due to vacate last week. The landlord wants to sell, so they couldn't renew, and my daughter has had enough of Yeronga anyway after she was assaulted on the way home from a night shift in March last year. She no longer felt safe there. My son had a casual job at a nearby supermarket which helped defray expenses as he studied. The supermarket was completely inundated,  won't be reopened possibly for months, and in the short term his job's gone.

Each had organised new accommodation - my daughter at Red Hill and my son at Fairfield. Finding accommodation is a difficult process for students who don't own a car, are perpetually broke (despite part-time work) and actually getting all the paperwork together to apply for an accommodation lease is a complicated process.

Anyway, it all became irrelevant after 11^th January, as the new accommodation disappeared - in each case - under brown muddy water. Their stuff was high and dry at Yeronga, despite flooding very close to them, and the worst that happened to them was loss of electricity when things got interesting on Tuesday night. They were more fortunate than many of their friends who now have no accommodation, no furniture, and not much money to get back on their feet.

Still, they were confronted with the problem of getting their gear stored until they could organise alternative accommodation. The flood put a bomb under the Brisbane rental market, so this search has suddenly become twice as difficult. Historically, students stay in share houses at the bottom end of the rental market. Generally, cheap properties, close to U of Q are low-lying.

So the available rental space has shrunk - like a pair of jeans, it's affected by water. And there are more people looking - many who have been flooded out.

I invoked the very effective family Mafia - being the eldest of six has some advantages - and borrowed brother-in-law's Ute. Number 2 sister offered to put daughter up temporally and son was offered a corner in a large and disorganised share house by friends. He's easy going and will live anywhere with internet access.

We got busy moving furniture and boxes to an industrial storage (carefully chosen on high ground) after initially having difficulty finding space not already booked - suddenly there are thousands of people in Brisbane looking for temporary storage.

Unfortunately, to get to this storage at McGregor, we had to drive through all the devastation around Yeronga and Rocklea, and this added great chunks of time to the journey. It was impossible to plan a route avoiding it, as each time I drove between Yeronga and McGregor, the route changed. A muddy looking character in either Jungle Green or Police Blue would put his hand up and say - "You can't go through there, mate". A one-day shift turned into three days.

By yesterday evening the shifting was over, the unit cleaned, offspring in their new (temporary) accommodations, and I set out to drive back to Toowoomba.

Murphy intervened. It stormed. There were nasty fast-moving microbursts that uprooted trees, knocked out electricity supplies, and caused traffic chaos. The car (Ford Focus) was loaded to the gunwales with daughter's assorted paraphernalia, including 3 Ukuleles (she collects them), a large bag of rice with a hole in it, a very flimsy but attractive desk lamp, and many bags of clothes for St Vincent's in Toowoomba.

Included were also her gumboots (see image). She bought them at "Splendour in the Grass" this year when it got muddy.

There were also two laundry baskets filled with perishables and a very large beach umbrella, as well as a vacuum cleaner. It's amazing what you can get into a small car if you pack carefully. Caution needs to be exercised , as the pressure builds up and stuff erupts when you open the doors.

So it took an hour to get out of Brisbane because of the storm, and the Ipswich Motorway was a parking lot.

This turned out to be a good thing, as when the front tyre went down; it wasn't destroyed because I was just crawling along.

I was also lucky to have the puncture in a section wide enough to stop safely. I needed lots of space, because all the gear in the boot had to be unloaded on to the side of the road. It must have looked like some lunatic was running a garage sale on the roadside. The other piece of good luck was that the rain had stopped.

So I changed the tyre, and put the dinky little get-you-home spare on the front offside wheel. This wheel looks like something off a wheelbarrow, and the car handled exactly like an old barrow with it on the front. The German designer who thought up this system obviously didn't have the Warrego Highway, stormy weather and a car full of stuff in mind. The punctured tyre took up lots more space than the get-you-home spare and this added to my problems.

I made the decision to take the spooky tyre off the front (driving wheel in the Focus) and put it on the rear. On front drive cars  the rear wheels just go along for the ride if you get my drift. You can't get two wheels off the ground with the jack supplied in the Focus, so this meant three lots of jacking - work it out.

The rain had started up again, but I found a space in a covered parking space at a service station. Unfortunately, someone had, a few days previously, dumped a package of prawn heads about two metres upwind. This didn't improve my mood, although the odour blended well with the car which smelt of floodwater after three days in and around Yeronga. My daughter will be wondering why her gear pongs like off prawns.                                                                                                                                                                            

Gumboots and spooky wheel.

Much bad language and bleeding later (your skin gets brittle at my age) the job was done, and I was off at a steady 80 kph. The big sticker on the spare reminding me of this was looking a bit grotty by this time, but I was feeling relaxed and comfortable, because the car was driving a lot better.

Just outside of Withcott I saw a flashing sign saying "Severe congestion on range".

It was severe - see photo. It took another hour to get up the range, as the combination of a B Double breaking down and a landslide or two had complicated matters somewhat. The range crossing was a parking lot. Eventually things freed up and I meandered home.

So the one and a half hour journey had taken four hours. A glass of red and a 9.30pm dinner helped me contemplate the aftermath of the floods, and understand that whilst my family had been stuffed around somewhat, at least we still had beds to sleep in, cars to drive, and we were all safe.

There are twenty or so people in South East Queensland who have lost their lives, thousands who have lost their homes and businesses, and the knock-on effects will continue for years.

No doubt I'll see a different aspect of all this when I set out for Roma tomorrow. I have to drive through both Dalby and Chincilla, both recovering from record flooding.

i45

After the sad saga of the clunking Santa Fe, the fleet manager did the impossible and conjured me up a replacement vehicle at short notice.

It was another Hyundai, an i45, obviously intended as a rival for the Toyota Camry.

After driving it over 1500km this week, I reckon this thing is indeed a Camry-killer. It's a better car, in my estimation than the very successful Toyota, and if it doesn't eventually outsell the Camry, that will be a result of prejudice and cliche rather than reality.

It looks a bit ugly, but given the way it drives and the way it seems to be built, I could live with that. The fit and finish is first rate. The dash covering and upholstery is high quality. It has one of the sweetest engine and transmission combinations I've driven, and leaves the Toyota for dead in this area.

If you put your foot down (for example, overtaking a road train), it emits a refined howl, and accelerates at a very healthy rate. This is not at the expense of high fuel consumption, which hovered in the low sevens on the highway, falling to the low nines around town.

There has been some criticism in the motoring press of its steering and handling, but it was as least as responsive and comfortable as the Camry I drove last year on the same roads.

Hyundais suffer somewhat from the reputation of their early products, but they have made enormous progress in the last five years. This particular model deserves to be successful based on value for money and performance.

If you can't abide the way it looks, simply remember that from behind the wheel it's not an issue.

Clunkblunk

That’s the noise it made.

“It” being the brand new Hyundai Santa Fe that I was supposed to be driving to St George and points west next week.

The agency has leased three more of these things this year. Generally, they’re a good vehicle, basic, but built like a brick dunny and very capable on the roads I drive.

This one is obviously the exception that proves the rule. When I picked it up late yesterday (after the office closed and the fleet manager had knocked off for the weekend) my plan was an early start Monday morning. By early I mean first light.

It is almost new, having covered about 1500 km since delivery to the fleet, but it is marking pretty horrendous noises. It sounded like there was a whole platoon of little men with hammers hitting the transmission housing from the inside.

I dragged out the “Instructions to the driver” pamphlet in the glove box which told me that I should phone the RACQ.

I did, the techie turned up and I took him for a drive so he could diagnose (and perhaps fix) the problem..

He looked a bit startled when he heard the noises it was making, and suggested – strongly – that I stop.

He jacked up both ends of the vehicle (one end at a time – you understand), wiggled each road wheel in turn, checked under the bonnet and under the chassis.

He emerged, scratching his head and muttering something about “no oil in the trannie”.

You can’t actually check the transmission oil in these things – they’re sealed for life.

I was told in no uncertain terms not to drive it, and it is being towed off to a holding yard for the weekend. On Monday it will be dropped off at the Hyundai dealer, when the workshop opens.

Wish me luck in getting another vehicle at short notice on Monday morning. Maybe I'll have to use the MX5.

I wonder whether it was worked on by an apprentice who was distracted by the weekend at its 1000 km service on Friday. Perhaps the minor detail of refilling the trannie was overlooked.

Update: -

Turns out that the previous driver had a puncture in a rear tyre, changed the wheel, but didn't tighten the wheel nuts properly. For some reason he returned the vehicle in this state. The noise was the wheel oscillating on the studs. The RACQ bloke and I both overlooked this.

Wouldn't have been pretty if the wheel had departed at 110km somewhere west of Roma.