Hey look, South Australia, Sydney had a storm on Tuesday and the whole state didn’t grind to a halt
SYDNEYSIDERS endures the “storm to end all storms” on Tuesday — and a few thousand lose power. SA has one day of a heatwave — and 40,000 customers are powerless.
SYDNEYSIDERS are calling Tuesday’s extreme weather event the ‘storm to end all storms’, a once in a 100-year event of biblical proportions that brought the harbour city to a standstill - for the briefest period.
While South Australians have suffered ongoing chaos and hardship from our “freak” storms of late, the nation’s biggest metropolis, when faced with a major cataclysmic climatic event, was up and running again within a few hours.
The city of 4.5 million proved remarkably resilient to wind gust of 100km/h, record rainfall lashing down and thousands of lightning strikes across the metropolitan area that closed down all airport traffic.
There were large trees blown down causing blackouts, extensive flooding, widespread traffic chaos and all the other emergencies associated with a colossal weather cell that many long-term Sydney residents claim they had never witnessed before.
Resident were evacuated from buildings feared in danger of collapse and an $11.5 million mansion in the luxury suburb of Point Piper gained an instant swimming pool with a giant sinkhole appearing outside the property that rapidly filled with water.
Geoff, who has driven cabs in the Premier State for three decades, best expressed the awe of those that witnessed the unexpected deluge, worthy of a raised eyebrow from Noah.
“I’ve never seen anything like the rain today,” he said.
“I’ve been driving cabs for 30 years and I’ve never had to stop driving because of dangerous rain. Today the visibility was zero.”
Even the Salvation Army needed bailing out with the basement of its Redfern building inundated by 100,000 litres of water after the inner-city suburb copped 50mm in an hour.
Sydney’s city streets were awash with pedestrians battling to walk through flooded crossings as more than the average rain for February fell in just two hours.
But within hours NSW Transport Management Centre declared roads were returning to normal and there are not expecting any major delays for people’s run home from work.
More than 5000 houses lost power during the violent storm but power was restored with a couple of hours.
“There weren’t a great deal of problems’’ an Ausgrid energy network spokesman said nonchalantly.
So how can it be that a city with three times the population of South Australia survived the abnormal storm with little more than a shrug?
When South Australia had it’s once in a 100-year storm last September the entire state was blacked out — in some instances for several days.
The chaos was felt from Ceduna to Mount Gambier.
A place three times the size of Germany was in total darkness except for a few oases of light provided by diesel or solar generators.
Optus and some Vodafone networks were also down across the state.
Two days later there were still more than 75,000 homes in the north of the state that remained without power.
The Premier, Jay Weatherill, led the hyperbole charge.
“This is a catastrophic natural event which has destroyed our infrastructure,” he said.
“There is no infrastructure that can be developed that can protect you against catastrophic events that take out not one, not two, but three pieces of infrastructure.”
Perhaps in SA we’ve just been incredibly unlucky but three months later, two days after Christmas, there was another ‘once in a lifetime storm’.
More than 125,000 properties became affected by power outages after the powerful storm rolled through Adelaide dumping between 60 and 100 millimetres of rain in some areas and generating fierce winds.
Several days later some Adelaide Hills residents, mainly in Stirling, Bridgewater, Crafers and Balhannah were still without power and were joined in their misery with a number of properties in the state’s Mid North.
South Australia claimed the trifecta of ‘black storm systems’ in mid-January with another widespread power outage, this time with about 60,000 households (more than 10 per cent of the state) blacked out.
The Sydney storms and the Emerald City’s ability to brush them off and bounce back to normal, are another sober reminder of SA’s energy infrastructure woes.