Devastation in my hometown!

Pictures from news.com.au by KYLIE CARRICK, STEVE WILLIAMS, and CALUM ROBERTSON
And you can watch video here.

Well, its been anything BUT a quite week in Pinnaroo, my home town (as Garrison Keillor might have said had he been born in Pinnaroo rather than Lake Woebegone).

These pictures above are of a storm (at first dubbed a "tornado", but we don't get those here in Australia - in Pinnaroo they always call anything that is a big wind a "tornado" - they have done ever since I was a boy - but it never is, according to the experts at the Weather Bureau - but they keep hoping) that hit Pinnaroo at 2:40pm yesterday afternoon. My parents were in Adelaide at the time, but my older brother, Ken, got himself into the newspapers (the Adelaide Advertiser and The Australian:

CFS volunteer association president Ken Shultz [they never get it right], who manages an olive grove 40km north of Pinnaroo, said the area was a mess. "We've got 80,000 olive trees and we've probably lost over half of this year's crop," he said.

Thankfully he is just the manager and not the owner of those 80,000 trees, although I am sure that it will have an impact. I hope there was some sort of insurance. (BTW I have a barrel of his olive oil in my shed--very nice it is too!).

Apparently they received about an inch of rain in twenty minutes accompanied by gale force winds and hail. Mum and Dad are half way through building a new home in the town (retiring off the farm) and so returned from the big smoke with some trepidation to see what state their building site might be in, but thankfully, even in its half-built state, the place stood up to the wild weather. Other residents were not so lucky. A few homes are beyond repair and will need to be demolished.

A few tiles were blown of the roof of the Lutheran Church, but the whole roof was blown of the Catholic Church hall. Now there is a story worthy of Lake Woebegone!