Friday’s Storm in Hervey Bay
After the storm here in Hervey Bay I doubt that there are many of us who will every take the weather for granted again. While the weather on the Sunshine Coast had been bad all day here in Hervey Bay it had stayed relatively calm but that changed in just one or two minutes.
Within moments of the wind springing up power lines and trees began to go down. The Esplanade at Torquay was blocked when a big tree fell across the road near Gringo’s, branches and trees large and small came down right across town, large signs were blown over and live power lines fell on Boat Harbour Drive.
Some areas of town were blacked out for four or five hours and downed trees and branches can still be seen in many parts of town.
While many trees were uprooted - as was to be expected due to the drought - many others were simply broken off some distance up the trunk.
This is all that’s left of the tree outside the Torquay Post Office and even the shelter afforded by the buildings didn’t save this one. Further along The Esplanade around Scarness trees with much thicker trunks fared not better.
While many damaged trees have no been cut up so that they can be removed on Monday there are still plenty of fallen limbs and trees along the bike path and around the Botanical Gardens too.
Some parts of town seemed to be harder hit than others and while there was plenty of leaf litter on the ground around the Pier precinct in Urangan there was little else to show that the storm had hit there.
Perhaps the most spectacular damage that we’ve been able to locate was at the new toilet block being built on The Esplanade between Scarness and Torquay. Fortunately the building had still to be commissioned at the time the storm hit.
While there has undoubtedly been plenty of damage around Hervey Bay fortunately it has been relatively minor and there is no doubt that the rain that came with the winds was definitely needed.
August 26th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
One very sad part of this whole thing is that the council have now decided to charge residents to dump the tree green waste at their dumps. Up until this month this has been free, because they then turn it into mulch and sell it back to the residents. But not anymore. This weekend, I did what I thought was the right thing and helped my neighbours and friends to clean up the fallen branches and leaves, only to be slogged $7 each time to dump it. Apparently they now charge $3.50 a cubic metre, so a fully loaded trailer or ute gets hit for $7 - more if you have a bigger vehicle or ute/trailer combo. You’d think that at the VERY least, they’d waive the dumping fee after a storm - especially since almost half of it came from the roadway and footpaths themselves.