Michael West’s Blog

Last night’s storm was a cracker - in fact it was what is known as a supercell! There is widespread damage throughout the inner north of Canberra with most of Civic closed today along with the ANU and numerous schools and other businesses. I made it into work just before the ANU was ‘closed’ and was greeted with a few surprises - according to the ABC over 70 buildings on campus received flood damage. The internal roof of the brand new Le Couter building (opened late last year) has collapsed as the downpipes clogged with hail, 2 inches of water has flooded the ground floor, several windows have been broken near the workshops here at RSPhysSE and people have been seen shovelling hail from the roof of the new John Curtin School of Medical Research. The huge solar thermal dish at the back of the School was in the ‘up’ position last night and undoubtedly its glass panes will have shattered - it probably filled with hail as well. Fortunately there was almost no damage to the Oliphant and Wiegold Buildings where our offices and labs are respectively. So our experiments are all safe!

Here are some photos that I took last night in Campbell and this morning as I walked around our end of the ANU campus. The photo of the open expanse is the causeway near my unit that was a torrent of water last night.

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A very intense storm has just come through Campbell at about 10:30pm. There has been heaps of lightning about all evening which eventually reached a crescendo just as it passed over my unit! Then the hail started, small at first, then more frequent and larger - about the size of a 20 cent piece. Then the rain came and boy did it rain!! The BoM radar had it in the 360+mm/hr range - the highest on the scale.

When it settled down a bit I went and had a look outside to find a river about 25 metres wide and 30 cm deep flowing between my block of units and the ones across the causeway. I went for a wander up to the Campbell shops, basically across the street from my place, to find the road cut off and a torrent flowing down from the shops, across Blamey Cr, past my block of units and down into the lower parts on Campbell. You could almost surf the waves that were formed!! A few houses and ground floor units will probably have some minor flooding and several of the shops across the street definitely do. According to the BoM weather station at Canberra Airport about 37 mm fell in under 30 minutes!

I took my camera with me when I went outside and will post some of my shots soon.

G’day, my name is Michael West and I have created this blog for some of the following reasons..

• so my family and friends in Sydney (and other corners of the globe) can stay up to date with my adventures as I undertake PhD studies at the Australian National University in Canberra
• so I have a record of my musings on life, the universe and everything in between, particularly as I complete my PhD
• somewhere to display the millions of photos I have taken while travelling and exploring God’s beautiful creation
• as a place to ponder and promote dialogue on various issues that I’m passionate about