COUNTING STORM’S COST
AN army of emergency services was replaced with a swarm of tradies in parts of Waurn Ponds and Mount Duneed yesterday as the clean-up after Wednesday’s destructive storm continues.
A major storm burst left a path of destruction in the two Geelong suburbs about 1am on Wednesday, leaving four houses “completely uninhabitable” and up to 30 more with extensive roof damage.
The storm tore off roofs and smashed windows — even hurling a wheelie bin on top of one house — along Oakwood Cres and Ironbark St in Waurn Ponds.
About 75 cubic metres of debris was removed by the City of Greater Geelong, which deployed a fleet of six trucks, two street sweepers and a backhoe to clean the area.
Simon and Kristin Aitken counted themselves and their two young children lucky, despite the storm tearing off their garage roof and throwing it across their yard.
“Despite all our damage, the main structure of our house is still intact, the roof is right, but everything around the house has been totally torn apart,” Mr Aitken said.
“We’re sort of lucky, our next door neighbour has been forced to move out of his house and a few other houses along here are moving out.
“So we’re lucky we’re still capable of staying home.
“Trying to move now and still do home schooling and all that sort of jazz, it would be a real stress I think. My wife’s working at home, and studying and looking after the kids and I’m out working — it would be chaos.”
Mr Aitken and many neighbours now have the stressful wait to see if home insurance will cover repairs, and if insurance hoops can be quickly jumped through.
“Hopefully the insurance all gets done pretty quickly, and that process,” he said.
“We just know it’s going to be a long haul, it’s not a couple of weeks sort of fix-up job, it’s gonna be three or four months easy to even get it back to a decent sort of state.”
Kylie Koulkoudinas and husband Manuel were asleep in their Ironbark St home when they were woken by lightning and thunder.
“I jumped out of bed, looked out the window and saw a trampoline through our neighbour’s car,” she said.
“We walked out of the bedroom and stepped straight onto shattered glass.”
Their home suffered extensive damage to the roof, water collapsed the garage ceiling and glass windows and doors were shattered.
Despite the “surreal” experience, Ms Koulkoudinas said the community stepped up right away, helping them in any way they could.
“We had people help us get our cars out of the garage, people were cleaning debris off the street,” she said.
“We’ve met neighbours we didn’t even know during our years living there.
“It’s fantastic to know we belong to this community.”