brisbane – blog.nya.nz

Once-in-50-year prep

Living in subtropical South East Queensland, you get used to major weather events like heavy rain, flooding, and strong winds happening on a semi-regular basis.

So when you hear that a cyclone’s formed off the coast some distance away almost two weeks ago – at first you’d be inclined to dismiss the severity of it because few cyclones make it this far south.

Well… we’re in for a big one this week with Tropical Cyclone Alfred wandering down the coast for a while, but now making a cruel sharp westward turn straight for us!

Forecast map of the path of Tropical Cyclone Alfred, generated by the Bureau of Meteorology at 4:43pm AEST, Tuesday 4 March 2025.

The forecast path of the cyclone tracks southwest parallel to the Queensland coast until 4pm March 4, after which it makes a sharp westward turn towards Brisbane, crossing the coast at approximately 4am March 7. — Tropical Cyclone Forecast Track Map for Tropical Cyclone Alfred 22U, generated by the Bureau of Meteorology at 4:43pm AEST Tuesday 4 March 2025.

The last major cyclone to make landfall around South East Queensland was around 50 years ago, so naturally the population here isn’t used to it. Mild panic buying of water, batteries, even toilet paper (bringing back memories of COVID…) has set in, but otherwise things are orderly at the moment.

A supermarket aisle with all bottled water products gone. — No bottled water in sight.

We’ve prepped my place a number of days prior – while we’re not at risk of direct flooding we are on a sloping plot so we put in some improved drainage and got some sandbags which has been fortuitous because apparently sandbag queues have gotten quite long over the last 48 hours and some places can’t keep up with demand.

Neighbours opposite us have actually completely cut down some ~4-storey-tall trees down, probably due to the high risk of flattening nearby houses and electricity infrastructure – which goes to show how seriously this is being taken.

I personally haven’t experienced a cyclone myself, so fingers crossed we get to the other side unscathed!

Stay safe everyone!

Shaking like a Leaf (I): From dawn till dusk

This blog post is part of a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Day 1: Brisbane to Newcastle via Pacific Highway

The first day involved travelling from Brisbane to Newcastle, which is around 780km. This was going to be longest I would be driving in a single day – partly because I had planned the road trip a little late and needed to fit around some schedules to catch up with people along the way. I probably would have stopped to stay in places like Coffs Harbour along the way if I hadn’t stuffed up the timing of the initial part of the trip.

A screenshot of the A Better Route Planner app, with a route marked between Brisbane and Newcastle, with multiple pins indicating locations for electric vehicle charging. — ABRP in action.

For general planning I used the “A Better Route Planner” app (ABRP) which suggested that it would take around 12 hours or so all up to cover the distance with some of the stopovers included. This app automatically routes travel to include charging stations, adds charge time to the total trip time, and you can even customise things like the remaining level of charge you want when arriving, and so on. I’ll pop comments about ABRP throughout this series, but overall I have found it pretty good and mostly lined up with my manual planning before I discovered the app, though its UI has quite a few quirks which can be frustrating at times.

For this leg I gave myself another 2 hours above the estimate, and planned for 14 hours in total with around 9 hours on the road. That would mean I would start at 3am AEST and arrive around 6pm AEDT.¹ An early start, but not something I haven’t done before in previous travels.

Shaking like a Leaf: the EV road trip from hell?

This blog post is the first in a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Not many people know that I had acquired a Nissan Leaf as a second-hand Japanese import into Australia during COVID. It’s a battery electric vehicle, that until 2020 was the most popular consumer electric car in the world, and I decided to make it my first car after years of solely using public transport in various cities and needing a little bit more flexibility.