Stormy Leongatha burst more show than go

LEONGATHA was hit with a short, sharp burst of tropical rainfall at about 3.45pm on Monday, January 23 which some rainfall monitors put at a decent 37mls but it was widely variable below that across the town and nearby.

Wonthaggi copped the tail-end of one of those storm cells, however while Korumburra got plenty of rumbles and the sign of something brewing, the town didn’t get any rain at all.

But what some residents saw was a meteorological phenomenon called a waterspout.

Mark and Sonya Wightman were travelling in the direction of Fishers Timber yard when they saw the water spout emerge from a storm cell, coming from the Inverloch direction, going towards Kardella South and ultimately Leongatha.

“It just dropped down straight out of that storm cell to the ground and spun around there for two and a half minutes or so but it was pretty distinctive, you could clearly see it.

“Sort of a freak incident, you don’t often see one,” said Mark”

“I’d say is was at about 3.30pm, coming up from Inverloch way, over to the south-west of where we were,” said Sonya.

Sonya posted the interesting meteorological event on the Korumburra Community Noticeboard.

A waterspout is a spinning column of air that sucks up water (usually from the ocean) to make a twisting funnel of water and cloud connecting the sea and the sky, or in this case, the land to the sky.