At around 2am, the whole household was awakened instantaneously by the sound of almond sized hail dropping on our roof. As our roof is large and we have no attic this sounded like somebody throwing 1000's of rocks on it. This was accompanied by and the most spectacular thunder and lightning I have ever seen and heard. Most of it was fork but was was going between clouds and the multiple concurrent strikes were unending. Just as we were checking that the dogs were OK (er plural, more on that later) the power went down and the search for candles and torches proceeded. The dogs were actually scared ****less but thankfully without ****.
My weather machine recorded over 30mm of rain (including melted hail, I guess) in the last day and wind gusts of up to 66km/hr. The main storm passed us in about 20 minutes but left a trail of devastation, and I spent sometime afterwards transfixed by its eastward journey carrying with it that extraordinary lightning. You can click on the Metric Underground widget at the right to get the story in numbers.
This morning we had some cleanup to do, but we were lucky, all the slates are still on the roof!
Carol's garden was a mess though with broken plant material littering every corner. The tomato house I built was still standing and had no extra holes which I think is some kind of miracle. Apart from the plants (poor old Carol), the most damage was two broken garden lights (hail had just smashed the covers to pieces) and some quite artistic almond shaped dents in one of our blinds (see the nice pictures I took for the insurance man below).
Now there is just time to batten down the hatches for tonight's expected repeat performance.
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