multifarious mushrooms

My fellow blogger has written about the windy day in Melbourne already, but I have a few things to add.

I was woken by an ear splitting cracking noise and looked out my window to see a whole lot of vegetation that wasn’t meant to be there. As it happens, I have some workers here extending my veranda and replacing rotting weather boards along the side of the house.

I went out to where they were and saw it. Next door’s massive gum had split a quarter of the way up and the very heavy tree trunk and branches were now on top of my roof. Luckily none of the workers were hurt, although one of them was working on the side of the house where the trunk came down. He was a little shaken, but boys being boys, wasn’t about to reveal that he’d just had a near death experience. They were attempting to ring the SES (State security service). No luck.

At the peak of the winds it was 132 kilometres an hour at one point in Victoria.
The SES received 1600 calls. I kept ringing for 8 hours with no luck, so there will be more calls from people like me to add to the tally. 215, 000 people across Victoria lost power. At least I didn’t lose that. The internet and radio suddenly became very important.
Traffic, public transport (a misnomer, as it is privatized), power was in chaos.
There was a lull for short time and I braved it down the shops. There I saw a huge tree totally uprooted and all the power out. I also saw in the distance the dust storm which also added to people’s woes.

It’s been a busy and weird day. I await the beautiful men in yellow, who may not arrive until 3am or something, but whom I’ll be very pleased to see. They are all volunteers.
Oh the insurance. Apparently my neighbour is up for that. His tree.

Posted one hour ago at Wednesday 1.30am on the ABC site

“More than 200,000 properties are without electricity and the State Emergency Service is working its way through more than 2,200 reports of fallen trees and damaged rooves”.

Mmmm. I think it’s safe to go to bed at 2.40am. I don’t think I’ll see the SES tonight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under personal, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.