Stormy weekend

On Saturday morning I was at the Kelvin Grove outdoor markets, with wife and son, which is normally a very pleasant place to be.  (I really like the mixed university/apartment/retail area that has been created in the unfortunately named Kelvin Grove Urban Village.)

The weather bureau had been warning for a day or two that Saturday would have some big storms, but I don't think anyone (certainly not I) was expecting it to happen at 10.30 am.  That is an unusual time of day for a severe storm in Brisbane.

Anyway, although you could see the storm coming,  there wasn't all that much thunder until it started pouring down with strong winds, and we shot off into the safety of a charity second hand book store that runs inside some unleased retail shop every Saturday.   We couldn't see the street from there.

On re-emering into the outside world about an hour later (after watching a stormwater pipe suspended from the ceiling vibrating madly), we found the poor stall holders had lost many of their shade awnings and stock.  I didn't have a camera, but this photo (apparently from Quest Newspapers)  sums it up well:

Driving around town, as we had to that afternoon, it because clear that the storm had been at its worst in the inner city. 

Last night there followed about 4 hours of pretty much continual rain, lightning and thunder.   No damaging winds or hail, though.

That held off until this afternoon, when after some thunder throughout the morning, a serious amount of hail and wind struck around where I live.   This was the largest hail I have ever seen: "Gawd, I hope the windows don't break" size stuff.  In fact, my next door neighbout did have a couple of broken windows, as did some other houses when I drove around after the storm.  Here's our yard (not a clear shot, but hey the lightning and thunder was still going on.) There used to be some skylight material in that pergola roof where you can now just see shards:

And here's some of hail, picked up from the back door well after the peak:

The damage to the pergola was better than having some upstairs windows broken.  The storm happened at 5.35 pm, which meant the evening news did not really have much video in of the  damage. I think there must be some completely beaten up cars, and damaged houses, around the place in significant numbers.