multifarious mushrooms

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.”

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.