Since I’ve lived in this region I’ve encountered more wild weather than I have anywhere. The most incredible cloud formations that swirl and fold and climb and ‘cumulate and glower and lower. Anvils and mammatus and mackerels and mare’s tails, whipped into fantastic patterns by winds high up or hanging, heavy with precipitation… though you’d hardly call these ferocious barrages of water “precipitation”… I’ve been caught in them more than once, trying to outrun them on the road from Lismore to Ballina. The colors are a delight or a warning or both… pink, green, yellow, some hues bringing with them a sense of foreboding.
It’s heaven for storm chasers round here… I recall a grrl by the name of stormchasr I used to chat to who lives around here and took awesome photos of cloud formations around here… I’ll try to track down a link…
So most of you will know that we have been getting some incredibly Heavy Weather since the beginning of spring. Each afternoon the heat takes on that electric quality that is the harbinger of severe storm activity. Lismore’s been declared a National Disaster (I mean we knew that, but this is with regard to natural disasters…) Area after a series of damaging severe storms with incredibly high winds, flash flooding and BIG hailstones. These storms have been coming with incredible regularily, sometimes day after day.
We watch the storms rolling in across the hills from Lismore, literally rolling, heavy and black, sometimes hear the hail coming, a sound like a waterfall as it comes across the Maca plantations, and sit tight as it hits and rages us around us often swinging back for a second go. Day turns to night. Eventually it passes and the sun comes out fierce and full, like nothing ever happened…
So last night we weren’t *really* prepared for a storm, hadn’t checked the BOM, hadn’t heard any storm warnings on the radio, but round 5-6 started to get that feeling, and it felt intense, and I quickly tried to secure some things, put the animals away, try to calm down the neurotic dogs who were slavering everywhere, try to calm myself and keep an eye on my own drooling and just wait for it to come our way. So we’re watching the storm from the backyard - I’m frantic getting nothing done but doing it all fast… charlene has the camera out - and she comments on a cloud formation directly in front of us and I look and it’s a FUCKING TORNADO!
I’m freaking out, I’ve watched plenty of stormchaser docos and know what a tornado looks like. This is definitely a tornado, touching down, whipping its’ tail up then making contact with the ground again, funneling up into the clouds, you can see it twisting. I text Michael, who makes a smarty pants comment about toto and kansas; I call my sister, but I don’t think anyone really thinks it’s a tornado, they think i’m being dramatic, just saying “big storm” or something…
By this time we have no power, and in the footage below you’ll see why we had no power…
The tornado seems really close, and then there’s the warning about big hailstones that’s coming from lismore way as well, so we’re watching all these things happening, coming in from different fronts, but they seem to be skirting us, which I’m kinda glad about. The storm hits, and we get huge rain and hail, none of it as big as my head, (thank fuck, since my car is NOT insured…) and we’re without power all night…
We haven’t seen any news or weather… BUT… just now, as I’m writing this post and searching for a link for the grrl mentioned above, I come across this link to the Australian Severe Weather Association and this report:
27/10/07 - Tornado at Dunoon near Lismore, NSW - 26th October 2007
Jimmy Degaura of www.australiasevereweather.com has captured what must be some of the most extraordinary footage (13mb file) of a tornado on the ground in Australia at Dunoon near Lismore on 26th October. An initial assessment by Jimmy and Michael Bath rate it as an F-1 tornado
So it was close - very close, just a few kilometers away, and below is some footage from the same site of the tornado on the ground and the reason why we had no power: (it’s in .wmv format and it’s not small - 13 mb)
Here is Charlene’s footage of the formation we saw on the ridge. It’s a small file, and brief (cos I was telling her to get inside), but you can clearly see the tornado formation right at the beginning of the video. There were some other spectacular cloud formations happening at the same time and then you see the ensuing rain and hailstorm: (oops, the sound on this is a little bit teeth grindingly awful, turn sound off until i fix this…)
So, it looks like we’re in for a summer of Heavy Weather, and spectacular sky shows. Dare I say it, it all feels a little Climate Change…
This evening seems clear… so far… in fact the sky looks beautiful.
This report comes from your t0xic weathergrrl xx
ps. everyone in the world has just rung me about Dunoon’s tornado being on the national news and are we alright… so i guess it’s old news now, but god, i guess i’m reporting from the front line! x
