Over the past four days, the Northern Beaches has endured extreme weather with the NSW State Emergency Service (SES) working overtime to help residents affected by storms.
“Since this weather event started four days ago, we’ve had 222 requests for assistance on the Northern Beaches, which has been shared between Warringah Pittwater SES unit and Manly SES unit,”NSW SES Public Information Officer and Media Liaison, Wendy Camelloti gave Manly Observer summarised to Manly Observer.
“There is a lot of damage, particularly yesterday, down here in Manly along the harbourfront.
“Most of the jobs have been tree damage, falling on homes, falling on cars, falling across the road. So lots of chainsawing. Many roof jobs with flashing coming away from the residence and flapping around in the wind and fences flapping around. So, yeah, it’s been, it’s been quite a time.”
Since Wednesday (15 January 2025) residents have experienced swells of up to 8ft, gale-force winds of about 63km/h with gusts over 90 km/h and fierce lightning storms.
Many homes on the Northern Beaches also went without power. Ausgrid reported up to 16,000 outages; the number is currently around 3k.
SES volunteers have been working around the clock mainly with ‘tree-related jobs,’ chainsawing and removing trees that have blocked roadways, disrupted power lines, and destroyed property.
Local SES unit managed to keep up with the high demand for jobs, despite being constantly on call. The group even sent three of their teams out to assist Ku-Ring-Gai and Hornsby units which were inundated with even more tree jobs.
A reminder of the rules
The emergency service reminds residents to only call triple 0 during a life-threatening emergency in a storm. Calling this number alerts emergency services as well as SES units who have to drop everything to respond – and situations of false alarms pull resources away from where they’re needed most.
“When you do have damage, tree damage or something has happened because of a storm, call triple zero if it’s life-threatening. But if it’s not life-threatening, please call the SES on 132 500,” Wendy said.
“We’ve had several jobs that have come through to triple zero, where police, fire and rescue and SES respond, and it probably hasn’t been necessary, and it’s just not an efficient use of all our resources. It means that somebody somewhere in a life-threatening situation maybe isn’t getting Fire and Rescue or police there as quickly as they need to.”
BOM states there are no further weather warnings for Sydney and forecasts mostly partly cloudy weather for the coming week.