After being away from Melbourne for three days we were more than a little apprehensive at what we’d find after the thunderstorms, the TV footage of metre deep floods in the CBD and hailstones the size of1 golf-balls, tennis balls, lemons, etc all looked pretty frightening. How, exactly, would the wobbly old house hold up? According to the newspaper this morning, the centre of the swath of destruction had passed less than a suburb to the north, so it wasn’t too promising.
Tip-toeing in the door and looking around showed us the suprising news that we had no broken windows, no soaked ceilings, none of the roof was missing and that the leaning gum tree in the backyard was still standing. There are shredded leaves everywhere along the side of the house and in the back garden from the neighbour’s apricot tree and our bushes, the magnolia tree lost most of its leaves, and the jade plant took a pruning — but nothing much else seems to be a problem.
No sign of hail sitting around so it must have all melted by now, although some parts of the garden look partly plowed where it landed. A massive 68mm of rain in the rain-gauge, I can’t remember when we last had that much rain in a month, let alone in a single weekend!
So how long to the next “One in a hundred year” storms?
Footnotes
1 Where would we be if people were forced to simply say “Five centimetre hailstones” rather than what seems to be a news-media inspired fishermen stories of ever increasing sizes?
