The Night of the Gale

Night of the Gale

Now here’s a little meteorology lesson: An anticyclone, an area of high pressure, creates winds that travel in an anticlockwise direction. On the other hand, a depression, an area of low pressure creates winds that travel in a clockwise direction. When these two systems come close together, and the isobars become tight, the winds the joint system generates can be powerful.

Albert was in the cab with me, late afternoon of 31 July 1975 when he pointed to an east-west line of cloud against the blue sky. To be fair, it could have been west-east, because we couldn’t see the start or finish of it, but it was curious. Neither of us had seen such a cloud before and we thought it might be an indication of a weather change, because we were sure it wasn’t a vapour trail. The day had been sunny and clear after a fairly solid frost, typical for a southern hemisphere midwinter.

There was an agitated knock on our door just before midnight! It was a young fellow who, with his wife, rented a small cottage at the bottom of the hill. I was used to him calling regularly because a bull I had borrowed, kept jumping the fence and getting into the paddock-full of steers next to his cottage. Just what the bull saw in the steers when he had paddock-full of cows at his disposal, I’ll never know! Anyway, the young bloke was struggling to stand straight in the warm, foehn, northwest wind that had sprung up, but he wasn’t complaining about the bull.

More meteorology: the warm northwest winds are caused by moist-laden air from the Tasman Sea, dumping their moisture on the west coast as it rises over the Southern Alps. The loss of moisture and the sudden drop in altitude on the leeward side, causes the air to warm up - and the accompanying winds are usually strong. The man had come to tell me there were huge flames billowing brightly at the back of the forest! He was right, they looked dramatic, but I had a fair idea the fire was beyond the forest boundary, somewhere in the Glencoe sheep run, which is further up the range. With the strong, warm wind, who knows where the fire might spread? I gave Curly a ring, and as usual, he didn’t want to wake up! However, just after midnight on the first of August we set off up Breakneck Road.

The moon was full, so bright that we didn’t really need the headlights and all the time the wind was buffeting us with increasing strength. We were travelling along narrow forest roads, gravelled and not much wider than one lane. The trees were bending to the wind and branches were breaking off them, but there was nothing on the road that our vehicle couldn’t bounce over. It was eerie with the moonshine creating shadows among the luminous patches, and it was uncomfortable travelling, but we were safe in the knowledge that branches of forest pine trees are mostly thin, so even the branches that struck the vehicle made noise rather than caused any damage.

There was a gate to open at the entrance to Glencoe run. I had difficulty standing in the howling gale. The noise was immense. It was a double gate so one side flew open on the wind and I forced the other against it! The gale was more powerful than me! We could see the fire was in tussock land beyond Shepherd’s Creek. The flames were rolling along at a rapid pace, pushed by the wind, but thankfully not endangering the forest. How many sheep would perish over there? At one time a patch of Manuka scrub burst into flames and a huge fireball jumped maybe a quarter of a mile to another patch. The humidity is always low when a nor’wester is blowing, there’s no moisture in the air, making any fuel far more volatile. We wanted to check the fire from another angle, by going through into the next paddock but stones and clods from the recent cultivation, some as big as one centimetre in diameter, had become missiles, flying at us horizontally! I wasn’t going to get out to open the gate, so Curly crashed through it! We confirmed that the forest was in no danger of burning, so we turned around to head home.

Trees had begun to topple, it was fortunate we had a sturdy vehicle and that Curly in a past life had driven bulldozers, so was used to pushing boundaries. Over the first part of the road, the trees were smaller and crashing over their tops, while difficult and causing dents was safe enough, but we were being pushed into hurrying by more trees breaking and their tops flying, with the windforce increasing. Curly was concentrating on his way through, but I had time to watch the swaying, rocking and fracturing trees. As they snapped off, clouds of pine needles wafted by or accumulated on my side window! There is a choice of roads that skirt Diamond Hill, both ending at the same point. We took the left, which was the windward side, but the topography was steeper and the trees bigger. It was a good choice. The road was covered in branched and broken-off tops, but we managed to negotiate it. Still the needles came at us horizontally. We found later that the windward side was indeed the safest, wind tumbles on the leeward side and the trees actually fall uphill.

The seven acre, compartment forty one had recently been pruned up to thirty two feet (done rarely and not cost effective) and thinned to two hundred and fifty stems per acre. The trees were therefore tall and fragile, their stems were breaking in half like match sticks! We paused for a few seconds to watch. After the storm hardly a whole tree was left standing! At least we were running out of forest, or so we thought. Off the hill, and onto the flat where, along the edge of the golf course, there were old-man Eucalyptus trees that now totally blocked the road! I remembered the gate, which allowed us to drive through the golf course, but we had to tear down the wire fence on the other side to get back on the road.

Across the bridge we found Bill Matches’ young pine trees were all down and blocking our way. We were close to the headquarters site now and there was the gate into the paddock that surrounds it. Our land. It was dangerous opening the gate, there were branches and debris flying through the air, and birds! Blackbirds were tumbling through the air, unable to fly. Most of the blackbirds and starlings in the district were blown out to sea and it took about five years for their numbers to build up again! There was one more gate to open, a Taranaki gate, which is a netting-wire gate that doesn’t swing. It was awkward to unlatch and as I fiddled, above me the high tension wires were whistling danger! I glanced at the poles and they were rocking violently too!

Back home by about 4:30am, I found the boys in bed with Mags, the three of them were anxious for my safety and because of the battering the house was taking! There was no sleep for us, so I made a cup of tea, using a gas ring we kept for emergencies because of course there was no electricity. I drew the drapes in the bedroom, peered out, and returned to my brew. Suddenly I realised something was not quite right, it hadn’t registered, so I went back to the window.  Our car and truck were sitting there, naked, but the garage that housed them had gone!

It took two years to clean up the forest and a year to get our property back to normal. But a storm like that has a psychological impact and it effected many people in the district. The fear of strong wind remains with many even today.