By Anthony Segaert and Jessica McSweeney
Sydneysiders endured an afternoon of road chaos and mass train delays after a sudden storm swept up the state’s east coast on Monday, bringing more than 75,000 lightning strikes across the city.
The storm, which hit just after 12pm, caught city workers off guard, while tens of thousands of homes and businesses in the north were left without electricity.
Heavy rain and storms swept through the CBD on Tuesday.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Four struck by lightning in CBD
Lightning struck four people who were sheltering from the rain under trees in the Royal Botanic Garden just before 1pm, when the worst of the storm was hitting the city.
Four patients – a teenage boy, a woman in her 20s, and a man and woman both in their 30s – were knocked unconscious when the lighting struck, and all four suffered burns. Two were taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and two to St Vincent’s Hospital, all in stable conditions.
Three homes — in Bronte, Sylvania and Baulkham Hills — were hit by lightning, while the SES performed seven flood rescues in the west.
Lightning strikes train network
Lightning also struck signalling equipment across the train network, shutting down the T1 Western and T9 Northern line for most of the afternoon and leaving hundreds of commuters wet and stranded across the network before replacement buses arrived.
“Very limited” train services reopened just after 5pm, a Transport for NSW spokesperson said, but delays remained for most of the evening.
“T1 Western and T9 Northern will have significant delays for the evening peak [and] the T2 Inner West and T3 Bankstown Line will also be impacted by flow-on delays,” they said.
Train delays at North Sydney left hundreds stranded.Credit: Jamie Berry
Delays were expected to continue for most of the evening.
One runway at Sydney Airport was also struck, taking it offline for about 20 minutes. It was repaired but customers arriving and departing the airport faced significant delays, and about 15 departing international and domestic flights were cancelled. Taylor Swift’s jet had no problems touching down: the pop star’s private plane landed safely just before 1.30pm.
Some of her fans weren’t so lucky: Several Sydneysiders who had flown to Melbourne for the show with plans to fly back on Monday were stranded by cancelled flights.
“[My colleague and her friend] cannot get home by bus, train or plane for days because everything is booked out,” one Facebook user wrote. “Has anyone else in the same situation hired a car or something and are looking for friendly passengers?”
Power outages in north
Just under 3000 homes and businesses in Hornsby, Turramurra, Thornleigh and Belrose were still without power as at 6.30pm, after lightning struck part of the electricity network.
Earlier, about 13,000 households and businesses around Balgowlah and Seaforth were left in the dark after the storm damaged an overhead power line that ran between Beacon Hill and Allambie Heights, electricity provider Ausgrid said.
Sydneysiders were left running for cover.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
All outages were caused by lightning strikes, the company spokesperson said. “Just like a house has a trip system … when lightning hits a part of a network it automatically trips and turns off, so we can inspect for any physical damage before we re-energise,” the spokesperson said.
Services were expected to be restored late in the evening.
More rain on Tuesday
Sydney could face more wild weather on Tuesday, with a possibly severe thunderstorm predicted in the afternoon.
The city will reach 26 degrees on Tuesday and the weather will be mostly cloudy. The rain is due to stay for most of the week before clearing on Sunday.
The Bureau of Meteorology said an “upper trough and series of surface troughs” were causing the city’s slow-moving thunderstorms.
Jake Phillips, a senior meteorologist with the bureau, said the storms were coming in off the sea from the south-east and pushing in towards the north from the north-west.
A time-lapse video captures the storm sweeping through Sydney on Monday.Credit: Alex Mayes Photography
“They have dumped some pretty heavy falls,” he said.
The heaviest falls were recorded in Kings Langley, in Sydney’s north-west, which had 48 millimetres of rain in an hour.
By 6.30pm the bureau was warning of isolated severe storms in parts of eastern and central NSW.