Man dead, commuter chaos, thousands without power after severe storms

A man is dead and thousands of households in Sydney are without power after severe thunderstorms and damaging winds battered the east coast, on a day that also brought extreme and catastrophic fire conditions to large parts of NSW.

At least 90,000 households across Sydney, the Central Coast and Hunter regions were left without power from damaging winds and an east-west thunderstorm band, which rapidly cooled the city from a peak of 35 degrees as it travelled north on Wednesday afternoon.

A 76-year-old Central Coast man was fatally struck by a falling tree during a storm in Glenworth Valley, while power outages stopped trains between Parramatta and both Richmond and St Marys stations, causing significant delays during the afternoon peak period.

Trains between Blacktown and Richmond also weren’t running, and were replaced by limited bus services as large crowds of commuters waited to get home. Trains between Parramatta and the city were also limited, as were services towards the Blue Mountains.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Bureau of Meteorology put out a severe thunderstorm warning for damaging winds and large hailstones. After the event, BoM said the winds stayed below 90km/h– the threshold it uses for damaging winds – while Sydneysiders shared reports of small hail on social media.

“The strongest wind that we saw in our weather instruments that we’ve got dotted around the city was up at North Head, that was 83km/h,” said BoM senior meteorologist Angus Hines.

Earlier wind gusts reached 110km/h at Orange just before noon and 98km/h in Parkes at about 11am.

The NSW State Emergency Service received 1178 storm-related calls between midnight and 3.44pm, 860 of which were about fallen trees. Orange had the highest number of calls with 119, followed by Blacktown with 95, Doonside with 80, and Kelso (a suburb of Bathurst) and Seven Hills both with 24.

A spokesperson for Endeavour Energy said it had 57,000 customers without power across its network on Wednesday afternoon, with the worst damage concentrated around Blacktown, Doonside, Marayong, Seven Hills and Kings Park in Sydney’s western suburbs.

“The storm was short but intense with exceptionally strong wind and lightning,” the spokesperson said. “We had more than 580 reports of electrical hazards, which is more than any other storm we have had for a decade.”

There were 33,000 Ausgrid customers without power across the Sydney, Central Coast and Hunter regions, after heavy rain, winds and lightning brought down powerlines and damaged local infrastructure. About 27,500 households were still without power at 7pm, according to an Ausgrid spokesperson.

Around 39,000 Essential Energy customers in regional NSW were without power on Wednesday evening. This included 8400 households in Orange, and 7100 in Bathurst.

The storms moved too rapidly to cause much rainfall, Hines said. The most rain was 14 millimetres at Parramatta, and the rest of the city was between five and 12 millimetres while the storms moved overhead.

The storms cooled the NSW coast rapidly, but towns in western NSW such as Bourke and Walgett remained in the low 40s.

The BoM said the unsettled weather was caused by two troughs – one affecting Victoria and southern NSW that was pushing hot, dry air to the north, and one in the north-west of the state that was drawing down humid air and creating thunderstorms.

Between the two weather systems was a band through Central NSW where hot, dry conditions and winds were creating extreme to catastrophic fire danger.

This follows a hot, dry spring. In October, temperatures were above to very much above average across the state, while the rainfall of 19.9 millimetres was 59 per cent below the 1961-1990 average.

The forecast for a wet spring was turned on its head after a freak heat wave above Antarctica – a “sudden stratospheric warming episode” – brought drier conditions.

University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre senior lecturer Dr Martin Jucker said stratospheric warming events could have lingering effects at ground level, but this would have passed by now.

The BoM is forecasting a hotter, drier summer, despite acknowledging emerging La Nina-like conditions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States has declared the El Nino-La Nina Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is in La Nina, the climate driver associated with cooler, wetter weather in Australia. BoM is yet to declare it, but says it is likely.

Jucker said there were some differences in the way NOAA and BoM defined ENSO, but there was not a fundamental difference between being close to La Nina versus actually being called.

If it ended up being a hot, dry La Nina summer, it would be the “flip side” of the wet El Nino summer in 2023-24, Jucker said. This was because ENSO only affected the surface, while the climate was also affected by other factors such as changes in the stratosphere.

Jucker said the “crazy weather” was consistent with climate change.

“We’ve always said it – if we get more energy into the climate system, it will be more turbulent and more back and forth between extremes,” Jucker said.

Rural Fire Service deputy commissioner Ben Millington said the grass grew tall during the wet winter in the central and western parts of the state then dried out over the recent hot, dry weather.

“What we are really concerned about is any new ignitions today,” Millington said on Wednesday morning. “Any new fires under these conditions will be very difficult to contain and may threaten communities.”

While much of the state was in the second-highest fire danger rating – extreme – the Central West local government areas of Bland, Temora, Laughlin, Dubbo, Narromine, Forbes, Parkes and Weddin were in the highest – catastrophic.

The RFS advised farmers in the Dubbo, Narromine and Wellington areas to regularly stop harvesting this week and check weather conditions against advice in the Grain Harvesting Guide, to avoid sparks from harvesting machinery starting fires in hot, windy conditions.

Grass fires are typically smaller than bushfires but move extremely quickly and threaten homes.

A total fire ban has been declared for the Central Ranges, Greater Hunter, Greater Sydney and North Western regions for Thursday.

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