Wild Weather in Perth, Western Australia
Following on from my last post, I said that writing posts for the blog was a little difficult. Well, Mother Nature had something to do with that.
Perth has just been through the driest Summer on record with only 0.2mm of rain falling since November.... until Monday afternoon at 4pm when the worst storm to hit Perth in 16 years arrived. In four hours we had 40mm of rain fall with 120Km/h winds, thunder, lightning and hail stones the size of golf balls.
The resulting damage from flooding, winds and hail has already caused over AU$100,000,000 of insurance claims to be lodged, and more are coming. Many cars have been so badly damaged (dented panels, smashed windscreens & water damage) that they will be written off. Many houses have smashed windows and roof damage and falling trees have damaged cars and houses.
A number of schools were closed due to flooding or collapsed ceilings and even one of the terminals at Perth Airport had to be evacuated when a section of roof fell down.
The storm caused over 158,000 homes to lose power (including mine) and 2 days later there are still 4,500 homes without electricity.
My house lost power right at the beginning of the storm and it was not restored until 20 hours later. I was able to continue working on laptop and netbook with a wireless broadband adapter for a bit, but flat batteries and mobile phone towers without power made life difficult.
I even had a visit from the Police as our home alarm system's backup battery went flat and so triggered every zone on the system. This includes one zone which is a panic alarm with a direct connection to the Police. Even though they called on the phone (only one old phone still worked as cordless phones need power), they will still come round in person to check everything is OK.
Anyhow, power is back and everything is working again, just need to go round the house and correct all the timers and clocks.
This short video should give you an idea of what the storm was like (credit to Richard):
Below are a couple of galleries that have some great photos of the storm and the damage it caused:
Perth Now - Chaos as Storm Hits
Now the weather is fine again and the clean up continues.
At least there were no serious injuries.
David
PS: On a slightly different note, it sounds like the flood levels happening in Fargo, ND again this year are slowly going down.
30-Mar-2010: Added another photo gallery link.