Residents evacuated on the Gold Coast after crane partially collapses

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Police are working with engineers to secure a high-rise crane, damaged in a storm on the gold coast yesterday. Part of a nearby caravan park was blown about too.

Transcript

00:00It was about quarter past three yesterday afternoon when a really severe storm swept

00:06through the Gold Coast.

00:08It was really intense and quite concentrated here where I am now in Southport, so much

00:12so that there were wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres per hour recorded here.

00:18Now there's a caravan park just behind the camera and in that caravan park there's been

00:23a fair amount of damage from that storm.

00:26People within there have told us that there have been tarpaulins that have gone flying,

00:30caravan annexes that have hit car windows and broken them, boats that have been flipped

00:35upside down.

00:36So extremely intense weather here and it's quite similar, a lot of people were mentioning,

00:42to the weather event which happened here on the Gold Coast two Christmases ago.

00:47So a little bit of deja vu for people who come here on holidays every year.

00:52There's about 30 people who have been evacuated from the caravan park.

00:55But the most shocking kind of thing that happened from that storm was the partial collapse of

01:01a crane that's just to the left of me.

01:04The police have set up an exclusion zone because there still is a bit of danger underneath that

01:09crane just is at risk of collapsing further.

01:13So while that's happening police are just making sure that everyone is safe.

01:18But here's what some people within the caravan park had to say about their ordeal last night.

01:24She started chucking it down.

01:25You couldn't see because I was wearing glasses.

01:28The next thing I know it's just blowing a girl, having to fight against the wind and

01:33the rain.

01:34Just things flapping about and people's awnings and gazebos basically trashed everywhere.

01:39Our street was pretty good, touch wood.

01:43It was mostly just all the gazebos are gone and some of our annexes popped off.

01:47But other than that, that's the worst we got.

01:51Now police are just waiting to bring in two other cranes to help pull apart this partially

01:57damaged crane.

01:59But the wind is still too high and strong for them to actually do that work at the moment.

02:05They'll probably have to wait a couple of days.

02:07Here's what police told us earlier.

02:10Worst case scenario is that the whole crane comes down and given the height of the crane,

02:15it can really reach the northern part of that caravan park.

02:18So, you know, that was assessed last night as a risk that, yes, it could happen.

02:24We hope that that doesn't come to that, but that is a possibility given the weather over

02:30the next few days.

02:31So the clean up is continuing here on the Gold Coast and it certainly wasn't the Christmas

02:35that a lot of people here had planned for.

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