They Called It The Storm Of The Century!

Melbourne's Storm of the Century

They are calling it the Storm of the Century. When the astonishing hail, thunder and lightning and torrential rain hit Melbourne on Saturday (06/03/2010) afternoon it set SES pagers to overtime and the holiday long weekend became a non starter for most SES volunteers.

Hail damage to this garden umbrella

For the areas that were worst hit, it was all hands on board and for the lucky areas that missed the worst of the storm, crews were quickly assembled to assist wherever they could.

Where did this river come from?

Amazingly, throughout Saturday afternoon, Sunday and Monday; Chelsea received only a handful of jobs including some small building damage and minor flooding and so crews from Chelsea were assigned to assist at Knox unit. Chelsea crews worked throughout Saturday night, all day Sunday and Sunday night and again from early Monday morning.

Broken windows were only the start

On Saturday afternoon following the initial deluge SES received some 3000 calls for assistance. By Sunday afternoon 1000 of those initial jobs had been completed; however, in excess of 100 additional calls for help were being received every hour seeing the total number of jobs since the storm currently standing at over 7000.

There was major hail damage at car lots to new and used cars as well as cars at home

The worst affected areas were Knox with more than 2,500 calls for assistance being received other areas included Essendon with over 600, Malvern almost 500, Footscray with nearly 300, Waverley and Emerald each with more than 250. SA and NSW SES volunteers have arrived to backup their Victorian counterparts and will start work on properties damaged by hail, in the worst affected areas of Knox.

What a mess!

Teams are being requested to assist into the week as the clean up continues with the worst affected areas knowing that it will be quite some time before things are back to normal.