The South Coast Tornado

During Friday and Saturday an intense storm formed off the east coast of Australia and started tracking south from Queensland, through the border to New South Wales and on further down the coast. Nothing unusual about that – east coast lows are a regular occurrence in this part of the world. However this storm was destined to produce more than just heavy rain, big ocean swells and lots of precipitation.

On Sunday, at 3:18am I woke up with a start. There was a loud thumping noise coming through the ceiling. My wife woke up too and we both looked at each wondering what the hell was going on. I went to turn my bedside light on but there was no power, so I picked up my iPad, turned it on and used the screen to light my way upstairs. I quickly found the source of the noises. My son had been woken up by loud noises outside the house and he found himself in near total darkness with no light source. Being very afraid of the dark he’d gone to the only lightsource he could find (my laptop screen) and jumped up and down on the floor to try and wake us up, too afraid to brave the stairs. My wife calmed him down, got him a torch and we all went back to bed, assuming that the storm had taken down a power-line, not an unusual occurence. We didn’t really consider what could have awoken our son (a very deep sleeper) at that time of the morning.

In the morning I headed down to the beach to see if the east coast low had spun up some monster waves. It hadn’t, just a very messy swell. However friends told me that there were lots of trees down everywhere – so many in fact that the town was effectively blocked off until the S.E.S. arrived with their chainsaws and cleared the roads. On the news there were reports of strong winds taking the roofs off houses in Kiama. They also referred to ‘mini-tornados’ elsewhere including one near our village of Shoalhaven Heads.

After some exploration everyone quickly realised that there was nothing ‘mini’ about the wind that had blown through this part of south coast New South Wales. Trees were down everywhere, houses had lost roofs, farm buildings had been destroyed and livestock had been killed. Locals with a helicopter took to the air and photographed the destruction – they said that there was a clear line showing the wind’s track, in from the coast and that it linked all the affected spots. Later, as the full extent of the damage became apparent the Bureau of Meteorology confirmed that it was indeed a tornado that had visited us, an F2 tornado at that – more powerful than its cousin that blew through Kiama.