ILLAWARRA South Coast SES crews responded to more than 440 calls for assistance in the region since Monday.
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The Kiama unit responded to more than 40 calls for assistance in the area.
At around 9.30am Wednesday morning the Kiama crews still had a number of out-standing call-outs, with roof damage being the most common need for assistance.
“At the moment we’ve still probably got something like 10 call-outs that we need to respond to,” SES Illawarra South Coast spokesperson Andrew McCullough said.
“All up we had more than 40 calls and we had three crews and about 25 volunteers responding to them, most of the calls were for roofs being torn off or for other sorts of roof damage.”
According to the Bureau of Meteorology’s wind speed recording system on Bombo Headland, wind speeds in Kiama peaked on Tuesday evening with two gusts of 104 kilometres per hour, but Tingira Crescent residents John and Elizabeth Barrett believes the wind that ripped their veranda roof off on Tuesday night, exceeded that
The veranda roof caused damage to the Barrett’s house before landing on a next door house, which resulted in its occupants needing to be evacuated.
“Elizabeth was at home and she heard it starting to peel off and then it just ripped off and flew into the next door house, that’s when we called the SES and let the neighbours know,” Mr Barrett said.
“It’s the worst we’ve ever had here, we think it was probably somewhere between 140 – 160 kilometres per hour.
“We’ve only been here for four years, but our neighbours have been living here for 15 and they said they’ve never seen anything like that.”
Mr McCullough said the Kiama unit had also fielded a number of calls for downed trees.
“We had a number of calls for the usual hotspots like Saddleback Mountain and Jamberoo Road for trees over roads, in those cases we notify the police and they and the council look after clearing those up.”
While the Kiama SES unit responded to a number of serious jobs, Mr McCullough said residents seemed to be heeding SES advice to make their homes storm-safe.
“The good thing about a lot of the jobs we’ve been called out to is that people had taken the steps to prepare their homes and yards and that’s probably prevented a lot of the jobs from being more serious.”
