By Eddie Tichelaar
The time was approximately 10-10.30pm on the night of Wednesday 9 June 2021. I was sitting in bed reading when I heard the wind picking up. At first it seemed like just another wind storm but I had this feeling that something wasn’t right.
Having lived here for 59 years I’ve heard a few storms in this area. Minutes later the winds got stronger and stronger and then my CFA pager went off to reports of rescues trees down on houses up in the hills.
Minutes later, all we heard were sirens from CFA and SES heading up Mount Dandenong Tourist Road. At the same time, I heard a massive thud and the power went out in my house. I didn’t give it much thought and figured the power will be back on in the morning, how wrong I was.
I subsequently spent about two hours at the Montrose Fire Station and over the next two hours we had call after call come in and for our membership and the other emergency services, it was a busy night that went on for days.
I left the station and went home around 1am. I noticed that the power was still off and decided not to fuss about it till daylight and went to bed around 2am and woke around 6am. When I woke, I noticed the power was still off so decided I would go and investigate. Living next to my elderly mother, I figured I would go and check on her first to ensure she was ok, safe and warm. As I crossed to her property, I noticed my power and phone lines were down on the ground along with mums power and phone lines. Then I noticed a massive tree had fallen down from mums property across both our properties and subsequently the lines that were attached to my house had ripped the side of my house down.
While I was dealing with the two properties, I received a call from a resident from the caravan park where I have a permanent caravan and annex on site in Yarra Junction. The Yarra Valley had also been hit by the storm and the rain was relentless. We were advised that our caravan and annex were underwater, the whole caravan park had been evacuated.
I decided that my priority at this time was not the caravan it was our property my family and my mothers well-being. First thing I had to do was work out how to save the food in the fridges and freezers on both properties. Fortunately, I have a small generator so the priority at this time was to keep the food cold or frozen as much as possible in both houses. We consolidated our food between the fridges and freezers and powered them up from the generator keeping them powered up from 7am to 10pm every day for the next 6 days and turning the generator off at night so as not to upset anybody.
We were down power and had no communication as our phone/NBN lines were down and the mobile network was out. Fortunately we also have a wood heater so mum came and stayed in our warm house for the days and meals and hot water was sorted as we are on gas.
Once home was sorted, myself and our small team at the Montrose Township Group activated our Community Emergency Management Plan and met at the Montrose CFA where we had power and internet and started communicating with our community via social media and organising necessities for locals and neighbouring residents up the hill in Kalorama. Fortunately the telecommunications tower came back online after three or days days so we could have better communications again around the area.
It wasn’t till Saturday 19 June the power lines were reattached to both mine and my mums houses. The damage to my house was fixed within two months and compared to others, we got lucky and by November we had our caravan and annex sorted too.
We live in a beautiful part of the world and we are so fortunate to have great people living in our community so close and around us, that is why Montrose is where I love to live.
