Clean-up ongoing after horror storm sweeps across Canberra region

Clean-up crews are expected to be hard at work for days after a massive thunderstorm swept across southern NSW and the ACT yesterday afternoon.

Weather warnings for the region, issued by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) throughout yesterday afternoon, peaked around 3:30 with notice of a “very dangerous thunderstorm”, including damaging, locally destructive winds, large hailstones and heavy rainfall.

This was about an hour after the same storm had torn through Wagga Wagga, felling trees with winds of up to 106 km/h and cutting power to more than 10,000 residents in the area.

Four people were injured in the northern suburb of Bomen after their demountable huts flipped in the wind.

A man in his 80s was killed when a tree fell on his vehicle in Cowra around 3:50 pm.

Emergency services were called to the scene on Lachlan Valley Way, but found the man – who is yet to be identified – had died at the scene. A report will be prepared for the coroner.

The storm rolled into Canberra around peak hour, with the hardest-hit area the north, where many residents reported “marble-sized hail” as well as flooding and water entering their homes.

BOM senior meteorologist Miriam Bradbury said the rainfall gauge at the Canberra College campus in Stirling recorded up to 55 mm of rain, “the vast majority of that between 3 and 7 pm”.

“We had plenty of other locations receive between 20 and 40 mm as well.”

The top wind gust was recorded at Canberra Airport, at 78 km/h, with other areas measuring between 40 and 50 km/h.

“So technically, it’s below the damaging wind threshold of 90 km/h, but given how widespread the wind gusts were, it sometimes makes little difference, especially when they’re combined with heavy rain,” Ms Bradbury said.

Around 400 households across the inner north, Belconnen and Gungahlin lost power due to the storm until 6:30 pm. Several power lines came down across the city’s north and south, including in Moncrieff, Ngunnawal, Chisholm and Barton.

The weather eased temporarily from 5:45 pm with the thunderstorm moving off the coast in a southeasterly direction before another wave came through from 6:45 pm.

Rain continued throughout the night, resulting in a continual flow of calls for help to local emergency services, largely from the northern suburbs and due to property damage and fallen trees.

The ACT SES had responded to more than 200 requests for assistance across Canberra by 8 pm, and crews are expected to remain busy throughout today with more than 60 requests still outstanding.

A total of 253 requests for assistance had been received as of 9:30 am today.

ACT SES chief officer Steve Forbes told ABC Radio this morning more than 20 SES vehicles and 100 personnel were dispatched last night, “mostly in northern ACT” – in addition to units from NSW SES.

“Not so much the flooding this time, it’s very much the squally storm that came through,” Mr Forbes said.

“We had a lot of ridge capping ripped off, we had half a roof removed in Moncrief, hail in the Nicholls area up to golf-ball size – very localised, that was – but that has shredded laser light and skylights in people’s homes.

“Lots of wind effect, so … you’ll see lots of trees down along the roads where our crews have gone through and cleared them.”

Mr Forbes expected the clean-up to take a few days.

Over the border in NSW, the SES has received more than 2250 calls and responded to more than 1800 incidents in the past 24 hours (to 5 am), mostly for fallen trees, powerlines and damaged properties.

Across NSW, more than 143,000 power connections have experienced outages.

The BOM predicts calmer things ahead for the ACT, with the week of unstable air masses making way for partly cloudy or sunny days, with lower maximum temperatures of 23 degrees Celsius today, 24C on Friday, 22C on Saturday and 26C on Sunday.