Australian Extreme Weather- A ‘hairy panic’.
Intense windstorm in Australia over the weekend left parts of one suburb outside of Melbourne buried under an overabundance of tumbleweed.
The following written content by Lauren Fox
An intense windstorm in Australia over the weekend left parts of one suburb outside of Melbourne buried under an overabundance of tumbleweed. The freak weather event had residents, some of whom have lived in the area for 15 years, in stunned amazement at the sheer volume of tumbleweed that blew in, some of which was piled waist-deep.
Throughout the Australian state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located on the country’s southeastern coast, severe weather led to more than 200 calls from residents to the State Emergency Service within a span of only seven hours.
More than 160 of those calls were reporting downed trees and 23 for damaged buildings, according to local media reports. An urgent thunderstorm asthma warning was even issued, and Ambulance Victoria reported an increase in calls from people struggling to breathe as a dust storm washed through the area.
The weather in one suburb of the city, however, led to an event much more unusual on Saturday, according to Reuters.
The strong winds whipped through the Melbourne suburb of Hillside and brought with it what AccuWeather Broadcast Meteorologist Adam Del Rosso described as a “freakish” amount of tumbleweed.
“It’s created this grass storm,” Margaret Prosaic, a Hillside resident, said. “And it’s just completely taken over our back yard, our front yard — as you can see.”
The winds ripped through the suburb late in the morning, bringing the massive tumbleweeds with them. By the evening, the winds continued to pick up, depositing tumbleweed everywhere.
“Not in the 15 years we’ve been here, we’ve never seen this sort of thing happen,” Naomi Gauci, a resident of Hillside, told 7News Australia.
The grass, which is known as “hairy panic” or “witch grass,” blew in seemingly out of nowhere, according to residents. Local reports say the tumbleweeds may have blown in from a horse paddock located nearby. Read more from AccuWeather.
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