Deadly fallout of 24 hours of freak weather

This was published 15 years ago

Deadly fallout of 24 hours of freak weather

States were counting the cost today of  more than 24 hours of  deadly freak weather that  disrupted travel, business, schools and holidays, and cut power to large parts of south-east Australia.

As a Sydney family mourns the loss of  16-year-old Klara Clausen, killed on a school camp by a falling tree, eight children were taken to hospital after a tree fell on their demountable classroom in southern NSW.

A tree  crashed through the roof of a house and pinned a  10-year-old girl in her bed at Eleva Road, Healesville, north-east of Melbourne at about 4am.


The girl, who was trapped for an hour, was taken to the Royal Children's Hospital in a serious condition.

A man was critically injured when a tree fell on his car near Ballarat in western Victoria this morning. He has been taken to the Ballarat Base Hospital with critical injuries to his head, pelvis and a leg.

And a  37-year-old forestry worker was killed while felling trees at Shallow Crossing camp ground, near Batemans Bay in southern NSW today.

"He's been killed by a falling tree, not the one he was felling - it hit an older tree that fell on him," a WorkCover spokesman said.

Meanwhile, passengers aboard the Spirit of Tasmania II were counting their blessings after the ship turned back to Melbourne overnight after battling 20m seas. 

The ferry, which had 628 passengers aboard, left Melbourne at 9.50pm (AEDT) yesterday but turned back at 3.30am after 20 metre waves smashed windows on its upper decks.

Judy Archer, from Melbourne, said the voyage had been terrifying.
"The waves were just enormous, just enormous. I've never seen anything like it and I was on the bunk and I could feel my body sort of lifting up in the air and crash down again," Ms Archer told reporters.

But police have postponed a search for a Melbourne schoolboy feared swept away by floodwaters because of  treacherous conditions and because no one's reported a boy missing.

As rush hour commuters battled through floodwaters in Melbourne, witnessed reported seeing a boy clinging to a bridge near a swollen creek before he disappearing at around 8am.

Police jet skis searched  a backwater near the Sayers Road bridge for any sign of the boy, believed to be about14, at Skeleton Creek at Tarneit, near Werribee.

The distraught woman, who did not wish to be named, was photographing the flooded creek with her 12-year-old son outside her Sussex Court house when they saw the boy.

She said they saw the boy try to walk under the Sayers Road bridge when they heard a scream and she saw him clinging to concrete on the bridge's edge.

"It all happened pretty quickly, there was not much that we could do," she said.

"He was trying to get a grip and one minute he was there and the next he wasn't, but that was the last we saw of him."

 Melbourne recorded its heaviest rainfall since records began in 1856, causing flights to be diverted and stretching emergency service volunteers, who receivede more than 2500 calls.

The road into Melbourne Airport was flooded and flights were diverted. Trains and trams across Melbourne were trapped at stations and in depots and police urged Melburnians to stay away from the city if possible.

Thousands of homes in Sydney and parts of NSW  and south-east Queensland were left without power.

Heavy rain and large hail stones pummelled parts of Sydney and the Central Coast, causing flooding, while winds of more than 90 kph brought down trees and power lines and tore roofs off buildings.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Ward Rooney said the weather was among the most extraordinary he had witnessed.

Melbourne's average February rainfall is 45.8 mm, but the city received 120 millimetres of rain in the 24 hours to 9am (AEDT) today, more than for any other day in any month on record.

In Tasmania, heavy winds buffeted the north of the state, damaging homes around Devonport.


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