Yesterday (Christmas Day) Melbourne and surrounding areas experienced one of the worst hail storms ever to hit Southern Victoria at this time of year.
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The storm was due to freak atmospheric conditions. Hail (no exaggeration) a bit smaller than cricket balls hit some areas. Thankfully, our area only experienced golf ball size hail, but that did some damaged to trees.
Tile roofs and car windows were badly damaged in those areas worst hit, and emergency services were swamped by almost 2000 calls over a period of several hours.
Even though this is unusual weather for this time of year, I do remember having bad hail storms in December in previous years, so there is no call for blaming changing weather patterns for the unusual storm.
ADDENDUM:
After publishing this post this morning, I went outside to have look-see how the christmas lights survived the storm (they didn't), and found a huge gum tree branch had fallen across our new plants (see photos). I had to chop it up with an axe to get it off the plants.
Most plants (miraculously) survived unscathed. However, the new lime tree wasn't as lucky. I've patched it up and hope that it survives.
Just by the way, I have made 4 phone calls to Whittlesea council about getting them to prune the same tree which I considered far too overloaded with growth. Those calls were made from the period 30th September to the end of November. They still haven't done the job and the tree probably wouldn't have dropped the branch if they had carried out the work.
Sometimes I think we pay too much to councils when we can't rely on them doing the work they are paid for.
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