Dry thunderbolts in the night set the hair on end

2 months ago 6

Follow our live bushfire blog for the latest updates

A fusillade of lightning and the detonation of thunder arrived in Portland at precisely midnight. We hoped it was not the presage to a day of catastrophe for Victoria, but it set the hair on end and felt like the coming of a day of judgment.

A bolt of lightning over Portland, south-west Victoria, during a massive dry electrical storm just after midnight Friday.

The dry storm lasted more than an hour-and-a-half in this far south-west corner of Victoria.

We stood on the verandah, scanning the dark for a sign that one of those hundreds of lightning strikes had ignited the forest beyond the horizon or grassland nearby.

We were lucky. No flame rose into the night. Not here. Not yet.

We were a long way from the active disasters and impending catastrophe in Victoria’s Strathbogie Ranges and beyond, and in the north-east near Walwa.

But friends at Mansfield were siphoning water from their dam and priming their generator to defend their home if the worst were to happen, and they’d taken in friends who had been evacuated from the spreading area of the Longwood fire, a restless night ahead of them.

We were in touch by text message, hoping for the best, fearing worse. It seemed almost surreal these friends had been with us on holiday in our safe pocket by the sea only a couple of days ago.

Tongues of dry lightning light up the beach at Portland soon after midnight Friday.

The explosions of thunder and the bolts of lightning – some of them almost simultaneous, known with perfect accuracy as thunderbolts – brought home the reality that the worst fear of Victorians, uncontrollable bushfire, was only a flash away on a hot night.

We sat out by the coast near Portland, about half an hour from the South Australian border.

The midnight storm came in a long line of thunderbolts from across the border, lighting up the sky in south-east South Australia, itself a dangerous fire zone when the conditions turn malicious.

North of us, at Dunkeld, Strathdownie, Apsley and Horsham, paddocks ignited at the touch of lightning flashes. Local firefighting volunteers, on anxious alert all night, were on to all these small outbreaks within minutes and had the flames extinguished before they could race off across the landscape.

The thunder grumbled off across our bay soon after 1.30am, though the lightning, dry and dangerous, could be seen for another half hour.

Victoria’s day of trepidation was on the way.

Get alerts on breaking news as it happens. Sign up for our Breaking News Alert.