Broken Hill Storms-Duncs

I think all the emergency serivces might have had a busy last night,

Thanks for the interest Glenn.

It was a much bigger night than I first thought.

Thankfully I was on dayshift yesterday and at home last night.

It rained most of the arfternoon but cleared up in time for me to walk home. When the storm hit at about 9pm I was able to spend my time wandering around home clearing blocked gutters and overflowing drains to keep most of the water outside. We had up to 90mm in some parts of town in just 2 hours, even the biggest gutters didn't cope. There was about 200mm of water across the floor of the motorbay in the fire station. Thankfully the living and office areas are about 400mm above the floor so they stayed dry. The main street Argent Street was flooded form gutter to gutter and for a short time they stopped traffic coming through town from Adelaide to Sydney because the trucks were making waves in the storm water. These waves were flooding homes along the highway but that didn't last long.

The guys were out last night from 9pm til 4am. Dayshift today spent the entire day tarping rooves etc. The SES who are in charge of storm related incidents called it all off at 7pm until tomorrow morning when they will go again.

Most of the damage was in a narrow strip in South Broken Hill. There are reports of a mini tornado running diagonally across about 4 streets and causing severe damage to about 40 homes. It is all very localised and in most of the town you would have no idea that anything had happened. One of the guys on my shift slept through teh storm and did not have the news on during the day. When he got to work tonight and we told him what had happened he did not believe us.

Anyway no one was seriously hurt and the cleanup is progressing well.

Duncs