“People were in their homes praying,trying to figure out where to hide,” Owen says. “Is it under the stairs? Is it in the bathroom? Where is the furthest place from that big one outside?”
Kalorama CFA captain Bill Robinson likens the aftermath to that of the Black Saturday bushfires because of the number of crushed cars and blocked roads.
He and the rest of the volunteers were called in at 9.45pm,with the first rescue at nearby Erith Lane. But when they got there,a tree was blocking the road. And then another one fell behind them,forcing the crew to turn back.
Hundreds of trees were cut through with chainsaws that night,he says,with danger still looming above the crews. Short journeys took hours,with some roads blocked every 10 metres. He’s amazed that no one was killed in the Dandenongs.
“I was running on adrenaline,I did have a couple of thoughts about ‘we’re in a bad situation here’,” he says.
“The trees were pick-up sticks,that’s what it looked like,on a giant scale.”
Without power for weeks
The storm rolled on to central Victoria,particuarly Trentham and Woodend,where many woke to find themselves cut off from the outside world without power or phone services,trees piled high in their driveways.
Neighbours banded together to cut one another out of their homes,as power companies worked around the clock to get everyone back on the grid.
“I’ve been here 35 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Powercor Kyneton field leader Gary Scanlon. “Normally a storm leaves a narrow strip of damage,but to impact the whole district like this is unheard of.”
In Gippsland,the initial emergency effort focused on homes being flooded,as the Traralgon Creek rose almost five metres and inundated homes.
However,while the receding water at Traralgon left behind a trail of thick brown sludge in houses near the creek,the rural properties further south fared even worse.
Kat Gration had already noticed the wind was blowing hard on the school pick-up. Some trees and lines had fallen across roads,however she journeyed home to a rural patch of Mirboo East not expecting to be trapped there for four days without power and running water.
At 11.20pm,she and husband Brenton woke up to a large bang. There was also the sound of metal tearing from rooftops and glass shattering.
“I looked out the window and saw the powerlines smashed up all around the house,” she says. “The trees were so thick across the driveway we couldn’t get out on foot. There were just walls of trees down everywhere,massive landslips down on the roads.”
Unable to get out,they were forced to boil water out of their horse trough for their three young children to drink.
A friend eventually crossed through nearby creeks and paddocks to offer help,as the family fried what bread they had left on a gas camping stove.
Power crews arrived eight days later,white-faced after learning they nearly turned the power on to the whole area without knowing the Gration family still had lines strewn across their land.
“He told us they nearly killed our whole family. It would’ve livened up all the paddock and everything,” says Gration.
“There was water all over the ground and lines wrapped all over the gates and all through our paddocks with horses and across the driveway.”
They’re now facing up to a six-week wait for power to be restored.
Despite being hit first,locals say the Latrobe Valley in central Gippsland has had the least attention during the rescue and clean-up effort. At the height of the chaos,their own emergency services were diverted to Traralgon and further afield while they were told to fend for themselves.
Latrobe City mayor Sharon Gibson pleads for the urgent deployment of ADF troops to save her battered region from a trifecta of issues – floodwater,destructive winds and now erosion.
“It’s not going good down here,” she says. “We’ve got bridges still being washed away. It’s a disaster. We need the army.”
Ten days later,thousands of people are still without power in both the Dandenongs and Gippsland. It is expected to take weeks for crews to rebuild the poles and wires taken out by the storm.
Power supplier AusNet,which handles the eastern part of Victoria,has had to defend the delay in restoring electricity,initially telling customers most would be back on soon,before apologising and saying it would be three weeks or more.
On The Crescent in Sassafras,power lines are draped across the road a week after a large tree snapped a concrete pole in two.
The rickety hum of petrol generators echoes through the hills,with discussion on Facebook groups about the etiquette of running one late at night.
Alex Koehler shakes his head as he looks at the fallen power lines outside his house,bringing up a text message from AusNet telling him that electricity is likely to be restored the next day.
“They sent me a message saying that ‘we’re hard at work,blah blah blah’,” he says. “It’s going to be at least a week from here.”
Why did so many trees fall?
Many of the locals that The Age visited this week spoke about how unusual it was for the wind to blow from the south-east and whether that contributed to the number of trees falling.
Melbourne University arboriculture expert Dr Greg Moore says trees develop root systems over time to withstand winds that come from typical directions.
He explains that 60 per cent of a tree’s root mass will grow to meet oncoming winds – in the case of the Dandenongs,often westerly.
But Moore says wind directions are becoming more unpredictable because of climate change and during last week’s storms they tore through the Dandenongs from the south-east.
He says sudden rainfall that softens the soil combined with increasingly strong winds blowing from atypical directions results in trees crashing to the ground in extreme weather. In forestry parlance,the trees were “windthrown”.
“What you’re seeing is the predictions of climate change that were made the best part of 30 years ago coming to fruition,” he says.
Moore argues that power and telecommunications cables should be buried underground in areas with both large trees and somewhat dense populations,including the Dandenongs,where there is fire and storm risk.
But he concedes this would be much more expensive than the current system of wires hanging from poles across most of the state.
And while it is not always possible to bore deep enough to prevent damage to the root systems of trees,Moore insists the soil conditions and root depths will allow for underground wires in the Dandenongs.
After Black Saturday,the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission recommended that powerlines be put underground in the areas of greatest bushfire risk. Many of those same places are now dealing with this disaster.
It’s clear that putting all power underground would be a very costly exercise.
A state government taskforce established in 2010 to implement the Royal Commission’s recommendations estimated it would cost $40 billion to put power underground in non-urban areas.
When asked this week if the government was unwilling to put power cables underground as proposed by the Bushfires Royal Commission,Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio insisted the recommendations actually referred to a range of technologies to reduce the risk of fires from faulty infrastructure.
She said the government had diligently applied all the recommendations that were supported. “But we will always continue to look at options to make communities safe,” she added.
One thing the Corbins have learned after moving to Kalorama in 2017 is that living in a place surrounded by beauty also brings risks.
But they want to stay,even as they survey the trees still lying across their neighbours’ roads and power lines sagging to the ground.
Thomas Corbin says they have earned the right to be considered locals.
“If you got through this you earned your mountain folk passport,” he says. “No one’s a flatlander anymore.”