On the afernoon of 25th December 2011 as residents of Melbourne\s western and northern suburbs celebrated Christmas Day, a few supercells developed west of the city hitting Bachus Marsh and Melton. A moist and unstable atmosphere was in place with ideal wind shear conditions to spawn rotating storms. The result: very large to giant hailstones causing extensive damage. Although the storms initially weakened, a new updraft perhaps developing on the outflow boundary of the supercell developed on track for Melbourne Airport’s western and southern surrounding suburbs with some of the worst hits suburbs being around Taylor’s Lake. Tennis ball sized hailstones were reported causing widespread damage to thousands of vehicles! Initial estimates puts this storm into the 200 – 250 million dollar insurance range just for Suncorp alone! IAG has suggest it received 20,000 claims by early 2012. Suncorp has received 28,000 claims!
Archive for the ‘natural_disasters’ Category
Let the videos do the talking! Incredible tornado footage from Oklahoma large wedge tornadoes!
Some of the damage has been officially classified high end EF-5 and the damage path width seems to extend for 3/4 of a mile. Unfortunately, well over 100 killed and many are still missing – one of the tornado catastrophies of the modern era occurring in 2011.
