Australia certainly knows how to do weather in a big way! No drizzle or bit of a breeze here, it is either glorious sunshine or rain of monsoon proportions and wind to match. We surpassed all of these this week and had ourselves a cyclone! It cannot really be termed 'cyclone' because we are not in the tropics, but it certainly displayed all the characteristics.
The weather forecast had warned us to expect high winds and heavy rain but they did not know the extent of what was coming.
It had been a wet, miserable day and, as we went to bed, it was becoming pretty windy. We are still sleeping in the caravan and the wind got stronger and stronger, we could hear things flying past and hitting the caravan which was being rocked from side to side by the wind. The power went off at around midnight and by 3am it had become so violent outside we decided it would be safer to retreat to the house so we gathered up Monty and the bedclothes and made a run for it. After a bit of a fight against the wind to get the caravan door open, we made it inside where we finally managed to get some sleep.
We woke in the morning to howling gales and torrential rain still, no power or phone signal. We managed to pick up the local radio station on Ian's phone and sat back to hear the extent of the damage.
The storm had claimed the lives of three people in Dungog, where they had 38cm of rain overnight, and a house there had been swept whole down the street (you can see it on youtube). 200,000 homes were without power and some communities were completely cut off. The low lying towns inland were the hardest hit, although there was plenty of damage around here, the worrying thing was we were now being told this weather would continue for a further 48 hours!
We were lucky not to have any damage, although there was a point when the water was fast heading towards our front door but Ian ran out and dug a trench in the garden to give it somewhere to escape to.
Eventually the wind and rain started to subside after a couple of days but we were without power for four days and still have no mobile coverage. The Hunter River still keeps bursting its banks, there are plenty of people who still have no electricity and some communities are cut off and food and water are being airlifted in by helicopter, so we have been very lucky. The picture with the truck is of the main highway from Sydney to Brisbane two days after the rain had stopped!
We went out to survey the damage once it had calmed down a bit and saw many boats with torn sails and trees down but only a few damaged houses, which is incredible with all the huge trees around our area. we realised why the other end of our street had no electricity yet when we saw the state of the overhead power cables that had been brought down by wind and falling trees.
A weather event like this is very unusual, they are saying there has been nothing of this magnitude for 25 years in these parts, so it was nice of Australia to wait until I arrived to put on such a show.