If you read the post before this one, you will have read about the windiest day in Melbourne ever. In fact, we had a cyclone, although Tasmania caught the brunt of it.

I rang the SES (State Emergency Services) all day on Wednesday 2nd April when this event happened. That is, next door’s huge gum fell on our roof. It could have been a lot worse. The tree trunk hit the corner of the back of the house and I have a tin roof. I’m told if the roof had been tiles, most of these would have collapsed into the house.

The SES uses voluntary labour. I think some of the people who turned up tonight (Friday 4th) at 7.30pm had worked all day, during the day, before coming out to participate in the dangerous work they do all night.

It was very interesting to learn how they had to approach the tree which had fallen like this.

It was still attached to the trunk in next door’s yard, so it couldn’t be cut just any old way. The workers had to very careful that the part still attached to the tree trunk, remained attached for as long as possible, which meant cutting (I mean chain sawing) all the smaller limbs first on both sides of the fence.

Here is a picture of the workers contemplating how to cut the branches on my roof so that the whole thing didn’t collapse.

Here you will see my roof again with most of the smaller branches cut.

Then for the final cuts done in some way I didn’t quite understand which would minimise any further damage to the roof, weather boards and the fence.

Amazingly when the tree branch finally fell there was only a minute amount of damage and not even the fence was effected.

So 3 hours later they were finished and I promised to send my photos to the SES, which I have already done.

Every Australian loves the SES. They are used during bush fires as well as storms and floods.
But I think the government should be contributing a lot more money than they do which isn’t much. Apparently the SES began in 1935 ish as a Civil defence force.

The SES volunteers have to train and raise money for the equipment to their trucks by themselves. I certainly recommend that you donate to them.

I appreciated their work because they put themselves into possibly dangerous situations and work long hours just to help the community out. It is something I like about Australians, how they do help out in an emergency, but we should not take that for granted.

By the way, they are not all men and the work was hard. Those logs they threw off the roof were pretty heavy. There was one woman on the crew but they all helped each other and kept up safety standards.
The SES was ringing them to see why they were taking so long but as one of them said, “it was a mother of a tree.”