Thunderstorms cause widespread damage across Victoria

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The weather bureau has confirmed a storm that tore through Melbourne's west yesterday afternoon was a tornado. The SES received hundreds of calls for help, as heavy rain and storms uprooted large trees across the state, ripping tiles from roofs and flooding city streets.

Transcript

00:00I'm here in Sen Close in Wyndham Vale, which is about 31 kilometres southwest of Melbourne

00:08CBD.

00:09And you can see behind me the force of this destruction.

00:12It was enough to actually send this construction unit flying across the road.

00:19It's ended up coming to rest at the end on top of a portaloo here.

00:24And if we just take a look across the road, you can also see the force of this.

00:28It's managed to down trees that have been cleared off to the side of the road, but also taken

00:33tiles off roofs, in fact, all the way along this road.

00:38And we can see a very clear path of destruction all the way through Melbourne's western suburbs,

00:44which were the most hardest hit as this wild weather came in yesterday afternoon.

00:49I spoke earlier on with one of the very unlucky homeowners, Diane Taylor, about what it was

00:55like when she says that she felt this tornado come through and on top of her house.

01:01This is what she had to say.

01:03The trees outside were just bending in half.

01:06We just heard this big bang, bang, bang.

01:09And the kids were like, Mum, the bins are flying around the driveway.

01:13And then my husband said to my daughter, oh, did you leave the laundry light on?

01:17And she says no.

01:18And they went and had a look in the laundry.

01:20And actually, the manhole cover had gone a floon up into the roof.

01:24That was Diane Taylor, just only a couple of minutes' drive down at the road.

01:30And she says that it definitely felt like a twister right on top of her house.

01:35And that trampolines from neighbours were flying across into other people's backyards.

01:41We have heard from the Bureau of Meteorology, one saying that it's definitely a tornado.

01:46Another senior meteorologist, though, says that it still needs to have its severe thunderstorm

01:53team make it official.

01:55But it does look as if that really narrow path tends to indicate that it was a tornado.

02:02And there's normally about four to five of those sorts of events in Victoria every year.

02:07However, most of the time, it happens in remote areas and certainly not in the middle of suburbia

02:12like this.

02:13Now, at the height of the storm, there were some 25,000 people without power.

02:18That's been reduced to just about 1,000 who are still yet to be reconnected.

02:24But the SES also says that they had nearly 600 calls for assistance.

02:28They've been able to clear around 450 of those so far.

02:33But for Diane Taylor, she's still waiting for the SES to come along and just refix that tarp

02:39onto her roof.

02:39And you can see that there is a massive clean-up job that needs to happen here.

02:45So it's going to take a little bit of time for some of these people along streets like this

02:51to be able to recover properly.

02:52.

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