15 Jan 2024 CHRISTMAS NIGHT AND ITS AFTERMATH

As luck would have it, I was in Brisbane and didn’t return home until late afternoon on Boxing Day, so I missed the freak weather, subsequently acknowledged as a derecho, a more than two hundred kilometre wide, tornado-like wind front, by the Bureau of Meteorology, which struck parts of the Scenic Rim, Tamborine Mountain in particular, and the Gold Coast on Christmas night. I saw the full impact of the weather system during the two days I was on the mountain without electricity.

People couldn’t access their tank water, because the water has to be pumped by an electric motor. Driving around the mountain, I saw houses destroyed by fallen trees which had cleaved them in two, or with their roof blown off and walls collapsed. The trees which weren’t blown down, were stripped of their branches, something I had not previously seen. Along the ridge on the main access road, power poles were snapped or leaning at a crazy angle. The power lines were draped over the vegetation or simply strewn along the road for kilometre after kilometre. The power outage lasted for two weeks. There may not be another community in Australia with a population as large as the mountain’s, which relies on tank water. This drove the electricity supply company to put in a prodigious effort to fix the poles and lines in such a short period, given that initial predictions indicated the repair work would take months – only a minority of residents had a generator. Commercial generators were provided to power the shopping centres. I sat the outage out in Brisbane, returning on Monday, January15. Fortunately, our building was unscathed, though a number of trees had been uprooted in the park across the road.