Lightning blasted holes up to four metres wide in Melbourne house roofs as a severe storm hit the city’s south-east overnight.
Emergency services responded to about 40 calls for assistance at Aspendale as a severe storm and waves of heavy rain hit the suburb.
Phil Wall from the State Emergency Service (SES) says a lightning bolt blew holes in three sides of one house’s roof.
“The lightning bolt has hit one side of the roof and has actually gone right through, blown the tiles out the other side,” he said.
“So there’s only one side that hasn’t been touched.”
Lachlan Quick of the SES says six homes in the same street were damaged.
“SES volunteers were reporting holes of up to four metres across some of the roofs,” he said.
“[It was] pretty intense for the people who would have heard it, I’d imagine there would have been a lot of noise and smoke associated with it.”
The roof of Darren Kishander’s house in Birdwood Street was badly damaged.
“The wind started picking up and it just started shaking the house. It got really, really bad and intense, the house started literally vibrating,” he said.
“Half the roof is missing and the trampoline is wedged between the garage and the house.”
Mr Wall says there is a huge section of an iron roof wrapped around a transformer pole in the area and another large piece in a car park across the road, but they do not know where it came from.
“So somewhere there’s a house with a roof missing,” he said.
