Most extreme weather events in South Australia’s history
Adelaide is currently sweltering through a heatwave, but when it comes to hot weather, we’ve seen worse. We take a look back some of most extreme moments in SA’s meteorological history.
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Will I need a jacket? Is it cold outside? Is it hot enough for ya? How much rain did you get at your place? Did you hear the thunder? Was that lightning?
South Australians love a good weather event and our state has seen more than its share of noteworthy meteorological moments over the past century.
As the state swelters through yet another heatwave this week, we take a look back at some of the most extreme weather moments in SA history.
1928: ADELAIDE HILLS RAIL DISASTER
It never rains, it pours. South Australia’s river towns are currently grappling with the negative implications of having too much water.
An overabundance of water was also to blame for a disaster in the Adelaide Hills nearly a century ago, that had deadly consequences.
In late January, 1928, six rail workers were killed, and three were injured when 150 tonnes of soil and rock fell during work to demolish a tunnel on the Belair line.
The men were entombed in the collapse.
On February 14, Millicent’s South Eastern Times reported that an inquiry into the disaster had determined that the collapse was due to “a plane of weakness” which “must have existed across the strata, the presence of which could not previously have been known”.
But the inquiry also pointed to several contributing factors, namely the “deceptive character” of the ground, occasional dynamite blasts near the scene of the accident, the vibration of heavy trains going in and out of the tunnel and one more thing, the weather.
“...the weakness of the ground was increased by a heavy fall of rain during the morning and a sudden rainfall in the afternoon,” the article stated.
“Thus a combination of untoward circumstances produced one of the worst and saddest diasters known in the history of the South Australian railways”.
1948: GLENELG STORM
Described by SA’s environment department as “one of the worst” coastal storms of all time, it happened on an autumn day in 1948.
The storm pounded Glenelg all day with heavy rain and strong winds, rumbling the ocean and dragging the World War II frigate HMAS Barcoo towards the beach.
The frigate was grounded but was successfully refloated after several failed attempts.
According to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald on April 13, a man named Archie Oliver Pudney, 59, had to be rescued after he was stranded for more than 30 hours at the end of the jetty when the rest of it was swept away.
The report put the total cost of the damage caused by the storm at a staggering one million pounds.
1951: SNOWING IN THE SUBURBS
While snow is not exactly unheard of in the chilliest parts of South Australia, heavy falls, like
the kind seen every year in Victoria and New South Wales, are still a pretty rare event.
In July 1951, South Australians woke to news in The Advertiser that the previous day had delivered “one of the most extensive snowfalls in its history”. with falls up 5cm in the Mid and Upper North of the state, on Eyre Peninsula, southern districts and Mt Lofty Ranges.
Light snow had also fallen in southern, southeastern and eastern suburbs “for the first time in many years”.
“It puled up against fences and was still lying in some streets at 6.30pm,” The Advertiser reported.
The cold snap also brought hail and gale force winds that whipped up the waters along Adelaide’s coastline and threatened to tear the roof off the Glenelg Town Hall.
“Thousands of sightseers visited hills districts last night for the rare sight of houses, trees, hedges and roads covered with snow and bathed intermittently in brilliant moonlight.
“At 4.45pm motorists drove bumper to bumper along the Mt Barker road in heavy snow.
“At Mt Loftty trees were covered with snow and families built snowmen and had snow fights’.
A market gardener at Piccadilly, Mr H Cutting, told The Advertiser he had lived in the Hills for 70 years and could only recall one heavier snowfall, “about 33 years ago” in 1918.
SA saw another big snow event in July 1949 which The Advertiser at the time described as the “Heaviest Snowfall in S.A History” and which also caused great excitement across town.
But research suggests the 1951 may have been a bigger, more extensive weather event.
1956: RIVER MURRAY FLOODS
In the history books as SA’s worst floods on record, the 1956 floods tested the mettle of communities along the Murray, from Renmark and Cobdogla in the Riverland to Mannum and Murray Bridge in the Murraylands.
Devastating in their impact, the floods displaced thousands of people, destroyed crops, crippled local industries and left a damage bill in the millions of dollars in their wake.
The Murray peaked at 10.2m in Renmark and 12.3m at Morgan.
Some areas were reportedly flooded up to 100km from the river’s normal course.
The Advertiser revisited the floods on their 60th anniversary, in 2016, and spoke to several locals who lived through this extraordinary event in the state’s history. Read it here.
1960: SA RECORDS HOTTEST TEMPERATURE IN AUSTRALIA
It’s a tiny town of about 300 people, in the middle of the South Australian outback, the best part of 1000km from Adelaide. Yeah, Oodnadatta gets hot.
But in January 1960, Oodnadatta got so hot it set a national record that remains unbroken.
On January 2, the mercury hit an extraordinary 50.7C at Oodnadatta Airport, the highest temperature ever recorded in SA and the highest ever recorded in Australia.
The next day, the town endured its second-hottest day on record, a milder 50.3C.
Fair to say not the cool change the townsfolk were hoping for.
To put Oodnadatta’s record-breaking day into context, the hottest temperature ever recorded, anywhere in the world, was 57C, at Death Valley national park in California in July 1913.
At 2.26pm on January 13, 2022, Onslow, a small town in WA’s Pilbara region, hit 50.7C, equalling the recorded set in Oodnadatta 62 years earlier, but not beating it.
1976: THE C-C-COLDEST DAY IN SA HISTORY
If you sweating just thinking about that January day in Oodnadatta in 1960, let’s go somewhere colder.
We’re talking Yongala in the dead of winter cold.
Snow is not unheard of in the small town on the Clare-Peterborough Road about 250km from Adelaide and on July 20, 1976, it recorded the lowest temperature in the state’s history, an extremely bracing -8.2C.
The town also holds the record for the second and third lowest temperatures in SA.
The temperature dipped to -8.1C on June 16, 1959 and -7.9C on July 10, 1958.
1983: ASH WEDNESDAY BUSHFIRES
South Australia has had more than its fair of devastating and deadly bushfires but the Ash Wednesday fires, which raged across the Adelaide Hills, and across the state, on February 16, 1983 - 40 years ago this year - remain among the very worst.
With the country in the grips of months-long drought, the state was hot and dry, with stinking hot temperatures and high winds.
As Catherine Manning from the History Trust of SA wrote, the first fires started about noon and spread quickly, their scale and speed taking “many people by surprise”.
The State Government declared a state of emergency for the first time ever.
“In a time before the instant communication of mobile phones and social media, the confusion surrounding what was happening exacerbated the situation,” Manning writes.
“There was very little information making it through to areas outside the bushfires,” she writes.
“Many Hills residents were stranded in traffic jams attempting to get home to defend their properties. One exception was radio reporter Murray Nicoll, who gave a heartbreaking interview live via walkie talkie as he watched his home of 13-14 years burn down.”
Mercifully, a cool change and light rain on Thursday helped firefighters bring the blaze under control, although it would take crews weeks of vigilant oversight before it was finally over.
The final toll was terrible.
The fires claimed the lives of 28 people, 17 of them volunteer firefighters, burned 200,000ha of land and destroyed 383 houses.
2014: WELCOME TO ADELAIDE, HOTTEST CITY ON EARTH
SA has had a little taste of hot weather this summer but it trifles in comparision the temperature extremes the state was forced to endure back in 2014.
In January that year the state was sweltering through a proper heatwave, with Adelaide recording three consecutive days over 43.5C for the first time.
On January 16, Adelaide was officially the hottest major population centre on the planet, based on data from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation.
Adelaide reached a top of 45.1C that day, the 4th hottest day ever recorded in the city.
2016: WHEN THE WHOLE STATE WENT DARK
Look, it wasn’t exactly our finest hour. In fact, it was one of the state’s darkest days. Literally.
Shortly before 4pm on September 28, 2016, the entire state was plunged into darkness, and chaos, when a one-in-50-year storm smashed critical infrastructure, including 23 electricity towers and three high-voltage power lines, causing the entire system to collapse.
As The Advertiser wrote on the one year anniversary of event, the chain of events that caused the entire state to go dark, happened in just 90 seconds.
During that time, critical transmission infrastructure was damaged and went offline, key wind farms shut down trigging a surge in demand on the Victorian interconnector, well over its capacity. As a result, all remaining SA power generators, including the rest of the state’s wind farms, went down, plunging the whole state into darkness.
The mass outage, which made news headlines around the world, caused total chaos.
Traffic lights went out, people were stuck in elevators and at Flinders Medical Centre, about 50 embryos, belonging to 12 families, were lost in the blackout when a backup generator failed - an incident the then-Health Minister Jack Snelling called an “absolute tragedy”.
Wind power was roundly blamed for the ruinous blackout, but later investigations found the actual causes were far more complex. A freak storm was found to be the root cause of the event, but the rules governing management of the grid were also found wanting.
In 2020, a Snowtown wind farm was fined more than a million dollars for turbine failures linked to the blackout.
2019: ADELAIDE’S HOTTEST DAY EVER
If you had to choose five words to sum up 2019 in SA it would be these: Bloody hot and bloody dry.
On January 24, Adelaide again earned the dubious title of hottest city on the planet and on the same day, recorded the city’s hottest ever day on record, a staggering 46.6C.
The previous record was 46.1C, set on January 12, 1939.
And it wasn’t just hot in the city.
Twenty-eight suburbs and towns eclipsed their historic maximums, including Port Augusta, where the mercury hit 49.5C and Tarcoola, which hit 49.1C.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 2019 saw SA’s hottest summer on record, with temperatures more than 3C higher than the seasonal average.
It was also the state’s driest summer in 33 years.
Meteorologist Matt Bass told The Advertiser the record-breaking summer was a direct result of a warming planet.
We know there is a warming trend that has occurred and it’s proven out of the climate statistics,” he said.
“Having the warmest summer on record matches that pattern of increased warming over time, it does continue the trend that we’ve seen and adds to that historic increase.”
ADELAIDE RECORD. West Terrace has just cracked 46.2C at 1:42pm, after 130 years of records, beating its previous record of 46.1 on 12 January 1939 #heatwavepic.twitter.com/dDgBLkKCma
— Bureau of Meteorology, South Australia (@BOM_SA) January 24, 2019
2022-2023: ALL THE RIVERS RUN
The peak may have finally passed but the River Murray floods that threatened communities in the state’s Murraylands and Riverland, have been a natural disaster unfolding in slow motion.
As The Advertiser’s Paul Ashenden wrote in November 2022, the floods were the result of three years of La Nina downpours in the eastern states, which filled water storages to the brim.
And when even more heavy downpours caused major flooding in NSW and Victoria in 2022, Ashenden wrote, authorities here knew there would be no escape for SA’s communities as huge volumes of water came gushing over the border.
The state went on a war footing, building and fortifying levees, evacuating homes and businesses and organising emergency accommodation and support for families whose entire lives are still now under water.
Restrictions on recreational river activities have been progressively eased, but for many affected South Australians, it will be a long road back to normal, with estimates it could take years for properties to be rebuilt.
An estimated 1200km of roads were damaged, along with 3300 properties, including 360 primary homes.
In January, Emergency Services Minister Joe Szakacs described the event as “one of the most, if not the most significant natural disaster in the state’s history”.
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