Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Our tornado anniversary - a flashback

This morning is the third anniversary for when our house was visited by a small tornado in 2005. It was a frightening experience for us at the time, but nothing in comparison to what people have been experiencing with natural disasters elsewhere in the world over the past week or two.

By bizarre coincidence, a large team of power workers in half a dozen specialised vehicles rocked up at nine pm last night and set up powerful generator-driven lights to do a routine replacement of a power pole about 40 metres from our house. Their noisy exercise lasted most of the night. They were still at it at 2am. The place looked like a Steven Speilberg movie set - everything was so bright. My photo doesn't do justice to the floodlights and several dozen orange flashing beacons on top of the many vehicles.

I wouldn't dream of complaining - power pole workers operate in all sorts of lousy weather and quickly fix stuff like tornado damage. They are exceptional people who can always be relied upon in emergencies. Heroic even. If they feel the need to schedule a routine replacement of a power pole in the middle of a calm night, then that's good enough for me.

And as for the anniversary itself, it seems much longer ago than three years. There was a lot of damage to houses in a swath through Bicton, Palmyra and Melville. It's all been repaired now. We got a new roof out of the HBF insurance payout so we are not disgruntled, even though we did all the labour of the repair work on our house ourselves. In another coincidence, the renewal notice for our house insurance arrived yesterday. There's no worries about our paying it.

I described our experiences three years ago in a series of entries in this Fremantlebiz journal. Naturally enough the first one was on 16 May 1985. That otherwise mundane comments suddenly finished with the words, "Oops, thunder storm starting up - 5.54 am - gotta shut down." Eight minutes later we had lost a considerable portion of our roof.

A few hours afterwards my sons and I had pretty well retiled and temporarily sealed our roof as best we could in the dark and rain. I'd had several hundred spare tiles stacked at the side of the house and some small tarpaulins in the garage. The insurance company never realised how much urgent effort we had gone to to minimise further damage. The physical exertion made me feel very sore and stiff over the next few days.

Bicton Primary School got clobbered too. It was about a kilometre away to the northwest. We found bits of it's exploded music room in our back garden. Had the tornado struck during school hours its very likely some people would have been killed. We had three kids enrolled there in 2005.

So now via the magic of my Picasa website, here is the link to an album of some of my pictures taken on the morning the tornado struck three years ago. A flashback, no less:

Tornado
hits our house 16 May 2005

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!