BLOW!

My little slice of suburban reality was given a good shake up early Monday morning (google news “Bicton storm”). The twister/tornado/willi-willi/cock-eyed-bob, what ever, ripped a path of destruction through my normally, leafy, quite part of the world. Unluckily my house was in the pat but very luckily our house was not damaged. My neighbours and the primary school across the road were not so fortunate. Roofs were removed, whole buildings destroyed and mature trees ripped to shreds.

I will attempt to describe my person experience.

It was early morning, an hour or so before sun rise. There was an electrical storm rumbling so my partner locked our dogs in the workshop (they try to escape our yard during electrical storms). My son was wondering around the house with the digital camera trying to get snaps of the storm – he’s 9 so doesn’t know that it is virtually impossible using manual shutter control – so any way his mum sent him back to bed. She opened our bedroom curtains so we could watch the storm.

I was now wide awake as well so I thought we could all watch the storm together. I was half way down the hall when the sound of wind started increasing, the flashes of lighting became more rapid, I turned back to the front of the house, I could see the green flashes of power lines across the road clashing through the soup of debris, the sound was deafening, my partner was screaming, I ran back to the bed room. By the time I was there it was all over.

I can’t remember what happened next very well (does adrenalin affect memory?). Anyway I can remember searching for a torch, checking everyone was OK and looking around inside for broken glass (there was none). My next clear memory is wandering around outside in the dark with a light rain falling. I was distressed at the sight of our trees and then the scale of what had happened sunk in.

As it got lighter the scale of destruction became clearer – I wandered around the school grounds – whole buildings missing, brick structures flattened. I could see neighbours roofs missing – quite distressing.

During the day acts of kindness happened. Friends and neighbours helped each other clean up.

The number of gawkers was astounding. The event got a fair bit of media coverage (I missed this because we didn’t have any power) so the spectators were drawn like flies – It would have been nice if each of them had of grabbed one piece of debris each – the area would have been cleaned up by lunch time. My normally quite street was like a main road – between the emergency services, utilities and spectators it was like a major road.

Now my biggest gripe of the whole experience was the local council – Melville. My partner called them to ask that asbestos building material be removed from the roads and foot paths in the area. All the traffic (vehicle and foot) was grinding it up. She basically got abused by some woman in their operations department. I then called there health department , was shunted to infrastructure who said they would attend to it. That was on Tuesday. Its now Friday and the stuff is still being run over by passing traffic.

Well its been a long post so by for now.