The Windy City? Move over Chicago, I'm talking about Melbourne

We had some pretty extreme weather this week in Melbourne. Our city has always been known for changing its weather faster than a bipolar person changes moods, but this week was particularly bad. We've just come out of a heat wave a couple of weeks ago, and after granting us a small patch of pleasant weather to lull us into a false sense of security mother nature decided to hit us with gale force winds in the second half of this week.

And 'gale force' is not hyperbole; we're talking about winds that uprooted trees, collapsed brick walls and in a couple of cases actually killed people. Welcome to the new windy city: Melbourne, VIC.

To make matters worse, my university (Monash) has always been notoriously windy, which simply made Wednesday even worse. To give you some sense of perspective, here's a picture of a fully uprooted tree, taken during one of the lulls:



The storms also took out large chunks of Melbourne's power grid, with the unfortunate consequence being that the trains were no longer running. When I did eventually make it home, I found out that our entire area was blacked out, meaning that I spent my evening like this:



Most of the damage has been repaired by now, but there are still pockets of Melbourne without power. Overall however, credit has to be given to the emergency services for fixing things up so quickly.

Here's to hoping for some milder weather in the future.