“We could hear stuff cracking then these enormous bangs and the trees continued to fall,” she recalls. The sound of cracking branches continued to punctuate the howl of the gale. The mobile phone network was intermittent and their whole community was without power.Īs the wind picked up again, a tree leaned perilously over Katrina’s son’s bedroom. Fallen trees littered the landscape, neighbours’ homes had been damaged and road access had been cut. Venturing a little further, they began to take in the full extent of what had occurred. “But we had no idea just how bad it was until the next day.”Īfter a night of very little sleep, Katrina and her husband emerged the following morning to find trees down in their yard.
“The wind was roaring, it sounded like a jet plane and we could hear things falling all around,” she notes. In total it left 160,000 homes without power, uprooting countless trees, damaging over 400 homes, and leaving a community to count the cost.ĭescribing the experience as ‘terrifying’, Katrina notes she has never been through a storm like it. Katrina lives in Kalorama, a community that has been described as ‘ground zero’ of a major storm that ripped through the Mt Dandenong region on the night of June 9.
