Strong winds that have battered Sydney and parts of New South Wales are expected to continue, with emergency services warning residents to secure items in their back yards after gusts uprooted trees, downed power lines and blew off roofs.
The damaging wind gusts were part of a “wintry blast” sweeping Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and swathes of South Australia and south-eastern NSW, including areas of the Hunter region north of Sydney.
Neale Fraser, a meteorologist at the BoM, said the cold weather, which included increased snowfall at ski resorts, was due to a “very strong pressure gradient” generating fierce westerly winds.
Essentially, the windy part of the country was sandwiched between low and high-pressure systems.
“There’s lots of cold air and it’s very wintry and windy across basically all of Victoria and the south-east of the country up to Sydney,” Fraser said. “It’s a wintry blast – it’s been a very blustery day.”
While the weather system made Sydney windy, the city was a relatively warm 24C on Monday.
Wind gusts reached 85km/h in the harbour city and exceeded 100km/h in the Illawarra region, which recorded the harshest winds. Gusts of 102km/h were recorded in Kiama. The top gust of 104km/hm occurred at Cabramurra in the Snowy Mountains.
Fraser said that while wind speeds in Sydney didn’t reach the threshold of 90km/h to be considered damaging, authorities were treating the winds with similar concerns because of the saturated ground across much of the state due to record rainfall.
“Given the wet ground, these winds could still pose a problem. When the ground is wet it becomes softer, so it won’t take much force to blow things such as trees out,” Fraser said.
Thousands of customers in NSW lost power as a result, with Endeavour Energy saying they were dealing with nearly 25,000 people whose supply was affected as of Monday afternoon.
The energy company pointed to wind gusts of 90 km/h as the cause of the outages. By Monday evening the number of people affected on their network had dropped to fewer than 4,000.
The NSW SES assistant commissioner said the wind gusts had caused trees to be uprooted, roofs to be blown off buildings and powerlines to come down.
“With winds as strong as they are today we are asking residents to move their cars from beneath trees and to secure items in their yards and businesses which could become airborne, including trampolines or sheet metal,” Kearns said.
“Residents can prepare for winds by removing tree branches over buildings and ensuring roofing is in good order,” he said.
The NSW SES received nearly 750 requests for assistance in the 24 hours to 5pm on Monday with nearly 300 of those for metropolitan Sydney. The vast majority of calls involved trees falling down.
Forecasters observed wind gusts of 90km/h in parts of Melbourne on Monday and Victoria’s strongest gust was 130km/h at Wilsons Promontory in the state’s south-east.
As of Monday evening, more than 15,500 people were without power across Victoria.
Fraser said the strong winds would fall into a lull overnight but warned the gusts could restart on Tuesday morning.
“It’ll drop away shortly but still be breezy overnight. Then there is a fair chance it’ll blow again in the morning, but probably not as strong as the worst of Monday,” Fraser said.
With Australian Associated Press
