Stories highlight storm experiences

A Blackwood woman has shared her experience during last October’s storm, and though she was terrified, she was also amazed by the outpouring of support from the community.

Grace Rankin has a respiratory illness and relies on oxygen therapy to breathe at night, and said that while the storms in June and October were both scary, the October storm was more frightening.

When power went out across much of Moorabool Shire, including Blackwood, on Thursday 28 October 2021, Grace was left unable to power her home oxygen concentrator.

“It was pretty awful really. I don’t frighten easy, but I was frightened, and I guess my anxiety made my breathing even more difficult,” Ms Rankin said.

“I had no power to use my concentrator…fortunately I’ve got bottles, but one of them was almost empty and because it was dark, I wouldn’t have been able to connect the other one up. I just didn’t know which way to turn.”

Ms Rankin had been in contact with Moorabool’s Storm Recovery Team after the June storm, and Community Recovery Officer Kristi Sullivan realised how vulnerable Ms Rankin was without power.

“Kristi rang and she was amazing. She was just in touch all the time and she organised the CERT team to come, and they took me to Daylesford hospital which was amazing,” Ms Rankin said.

Korweinguboora local Andrew Phillips sees the bright side of losing the trees surrounding his property, saying “We never used to get sunlight in winter”.

It took Andrew and his partner eight hours to cut their way out from the front door of their Korweinguboora property to where their driveway meets Back Settlement Road on Thursday 10 June.

From midnight, they’d been awoken to the thud of “a tree down every ten minutes,” Andrew said.

“We still don’t sleep when it’s windy.”

The property is their little piece of bush sanctuary and is surrounded by the Wombat State Forest on all sides.

“We were so bushfire conscious that we really didn’t think of storms,” Andrew said.

To read the full story – Simply click on the following link

https://issuu.com/themooraboolnews/docs/mn_2022-02-22/3

in the 22 February 2022 edition
OR
pick up a paper around your town.