The Belmore Bridge across the Hunter River at Maitland, as seen in the 1955 flood.
The great flood of 1955: Part 1
IT started high in the sky, somewhere near Indonesia. A huge mass of warm, moist air drifted south towards Australia. Somewhere about Queensland it met an obstacle: another mass of moist air from the Pacific. As the two masses collided, the warmer one was pushed high into the atmosphere where it cooled. The water vapour it was carrying condensed and formed into liquid droplets. Down on the ground in NSW, people looked for umbrellas as the rain began to fall. They didn’t have to look far: rain had been falling steadily, on and off, for five…
