Whew.
Elizabeth March 8th, 2010
This weekend Melbourne was hammered with violent hailstorms. The city centre flooded, shopping centres were evacuated and the roof of Southern Cross Station caved in under the weight of the ice. It was pretty serious stuff, and although my suburb was targeted I managed to miss the whole thing.
I was shopping. Oops!
When Tim called with the news he sounded pretty freaked out. He told me that he kept waiting for our windows to smash, as the hail was golf ball sized and coming in sideways. He couldn’t open the back door because of the amount of ice piled up against it, and anyway he had his hands full with what was happening inside.
For a while the ceilings held up okay, but at some stage the hail smashed up enough roof tiles that water poured into the laundry and toilet. Tim managed to save the suits, coats and dresses that I had hanging in the laundry but everything else was covered in filthy ceiling water.
Let me tell you – nothing makes you appreciate the little pleasures in life more than wet toilet paper when you really need to go.
I didn’t get home for another couple of hours, and was amazed to see that there were still huge piles of ice on the ground. It’s incredible that the ice in this picture lasted 2 hours on such a hot day.
We also discovered that the ice had punched about 40 baseball-sized holes into the roofing of our covered outdoor area – an area that we sort of depend on to be covered and rain proof.
Sunday was spent emptying our laundry and cleaning it from top to bottom – not an easy task, considering that it’s the size of a small bedroom! I treated it as an opportunity to throw out some stuff and get it into better order. When that was done I cleaned up the post-cyclonic state of our garden, and after 3 hours managed to restore it to its former glory. More or less.
It was a strange experience to miss the storm entirely, but walk back into a disaster zone. All my pot plants had the leaves stripped from them, a couple of pots were smashed and I saw lots of plastic-covered windows on the houses of my neighbours. I’m really pleased that I had the car far away from the area, because although we have a covered carport I’m pretty sure that the hail would have bounced up and dented the car all over.
But of course the Universe works in very mysterious ways. I may have lost my Sunday (and 60% of my back’s functionality) as a result of the storm, but she sent me the Labour Day holiday as a small thank you for my efforts. That extra day off helped me to tackle some other little projects around the house that I hadn’t been able to get to, and now our beautiful new home really does feel like it’s ours.
Tomorrow morning (along with thousands of others, no doubt) I’ll call the real estate agent and try to get our roof sorted out. I feel incredibly lucky that we dodged really serious damage.
