Hervey Bay Gossip

While it seems that America has way too many parking spaces - estimated to be around 11 spaces for every family in the country - you would have to be Blind Freddie not to realise that here in Hervey Bay there just aren’t enough spaces. (And if you do happen to be Blind Freddie just wander over to the new shopping development at Eli Waters and see how hard it can be to find a parking spot.)

How did that come about in Hervey Bay?

Well Strewth has an interesting take on that problem.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s weather radar at Mt Kanigan near Gympie was turned back on today so that we can now have a more reliable picture of what the weather is doing here in Hervey Bay. The radar has been down for several months now while it was upgraded and those upgrades seem to have taken longer than anticipated.

However, it’s up just in time for the start of storm season and the forecast for the next three days is for possible thunderstorms.

If you’ve never visited the Mt Kanigan Radar’s web page you will find it at:

http://mirror.bom.gov.au/products/IDR083.shtml

You just never know what hidden treasures might be hiding in some of the garages around Hervey Bay but every now and then one of them makes a a brief appearance somewhere around town.

Here are two that we spotted recently.

The Minister for Veteran’s Affairs announced yesterday that Hervey Bay would share in the latest round of grants under the ‘Saluting Their Service” programme.

The Hervey Bay RSL Sub-branch will receive a grant of $1088 to go towards the restoration of the TS Krait Memorial and a grant of $4,000 to install a memorial at the club dedicated to nurses who served in wars and conflicts in which Australia was involved.

The Torbay Retirement Village will receive a grant of $1645 to help install a flagpole at the village for use by residents on days of commemoration.

Over the last few years Australians everywhere have been taught the importance of recycling everything that we can but what do you do here in Hervey Bay if you have something that you no longer need but is just too good to send off for recycling?

Well you can advertise it in the local paper, you could sell it on eBay or you could even save it up till you had enough junk to sell at a garage sale. But there are hassles with all those options and quite often the hassles really aren’t worth the money that you might make from selling it. So what do you do?

If you find yourself in that situation perhaps it’s time to have a look at the Freecycle Network at freecycle.org. To quote their own website:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,117 groups with 3,883,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.

And yes, there is an active group in Hervey Bay - you’ll find them listed on the Freecycle website.

A hat tip to Build a Solo Practice, LLC for the link.

After six months of peace and quiet at night the Rain Birds are back in Hervey Bay for the summer. Of course that means that we can look forward to their mournful cry day and night from now until March when they head back to Asia.

I guess it was too much to hope that they’d lost their way and weren’t going to annoy us this year.

You have to wonder what it’s going to take to get through to some jet ski riders here in Hervey Bay.

On Saturday police were called to the area around the Torquay pier to deal with several riders were were allegedly racing in waters close to the beach and then beaching their skis at high speed in an area where there were young children swimming.

While there are some who might think that such behaviour might be best controlled through stricter licensing procedures there is no procedure that can test for the common sense necessary to operate water craft in any conditions. And age is certainly no indication of the level of common sense that a person might have.

It’s going to be another great weekend here in Hervey Bay.

Saturday we can expect a maximum of 25 and a minimum of around 13 and the relative humidity will be around 60%. Winds will be from the east and there’s a chance of a late thunderstorm.

Sunday is expected to be mostly cloudy with a top of 23 and a minimum of 14 with stronger winds again from the east.

The UV index is expected to be high on both days.

For further information and forecasts for right around Australia head over to http://www.weatherzone.com.au

Strewth would have you believe that the Hervey Bay Council has done exactly that by approving ‘lesser standards” than “accepted guidelines” for fire safety.

But have they? Would the Fire Brigade have allowed the buildings in question to be opened if there was a real risk to the safety of occupants?

What are the “accepted guidelines” and what are these “lesser standards”?

Be sure to read the comments where a genuine expert has taken the time to set the record straight.

The price of crude oil is on the way up again and we’re beginning to see the impact of that price rise at the bowser. It seems that quite soon now we’re going to be seeing even bigger price rises at the bowser and some suggest that the prices could be so huge that we can expect massive social dislocation.

While it might be easy to laugh that off if it were the half-demented ramblings of rabid greenies it’s harder to ignore when it appears in a report commissioned by the Queensland Government. The report suggests that we’re almost at the point where world demand for petroleum is about to pass the ability to supply the product and when that happens our lives will change forever.

You’ll find more about the report in this article from Saturday’s Courier Mail - it makes sobering reading  and it should be something you consider as you make plans for the future.

What will it mean for the economies of towns like Hervey Bay and what will it mean at the personal level in a sprawling town like we have here? And then there’s the question that so many of us have to face; will we be able to afford to travel to see family and friends in other parts of the country?