Showers easing, Apocalypse unlikely.

Let's take a stroll down memory lane to a time more innocent, exciting and soggy: March 22nd, 2010.



Those of you not blessed with a Western Australian postcode may not know that that was the day of the Great Perth Storm. There were hailstones, fierce winds, flooding. Amazingly no one died, nor were there any serious injuries. There was, however, significant damage to property. The University of WA was particularly badly hit, with the windows of Winthop Hall destroyed and (ironically) the Architecture library flooded (there are some amazing photos of the storm and the damage on the WA Today website). Thousands of people were left without power for days afterwards, and glaziers and second-hand car dealers have been doing a good trade since then.

 In the days afterwards, particularly around university, there was a thick layer of plant matter on the ground - trees had been severely whipped over several square kilometres - and a not unpleasant smell of slowly rotting eucalypt cleared out sinuses wherever we went. Windows were boarded up and gradually repaired, flooded cars towed away, powerlines fixed. There was a sudden sense of community about it all - after all, we had all survived the Great Storm of Perth.

Now a similar thing has happened in Finland, less the hail stones, as far as I can tell. Here is a phenomenal film of the stormfront approaching on Sunday.

I'm oddly excited by the Finnish storms- I find it strangely poetic that both my homes, in both the narrow and broad senses, got done by freak storms in the respective summers/autumns on 2010.