By Taylah Eastwell
Three months after the wild storm devastated the Dandenongs, life is beginning to feel normal again for thousands of affected residents.
The winds have eased, the power is back and the roads have been cleared for quite some time.
But for Kalorama’s Markovic-Burgess family, the storm isn’t over yet.
On the morning of 10 June, after a long night of gusty winds and trees dropping like never before, Leigh, Lilly and their four teenage children thought their newly renovated home had made it through unscathed.
But at 5.30am, the morning after the worst of it, their beloved home was destroyed when a 100-year-old Mountain Ash smashed straight through the centre of their Inverness Road home.
“We knew that night it was quite different the way the wind was blowing. As the kids went to bed we told them to go fully dressed and we told our daughter who usually sleeps in a mezzanine upstairs to sleep downstairs. We all went to bed but didn’t sleep, we were just dozing, we could hear trees falling all around us,” Leigh explained.
“It hit the next morning – straight through the centre of the house. Imagine the sound that comes with your house being destroyed within a second. Within that one second there is the sound of breaking wood, glass, metal, steel and the roof. I can’t describe the fear of not knowing where it’s landed, where it’s hit, what happened to our kids, were they dead?,” Leigh explained.
Thankfully, no one was seriously injured.
“I was screaming at the top of my lungs. The branch had punctured through our bedroom roof and I could picture where it had fallen. I ran straight to my daughter’s bedroom,” Lilly said.
Upon opening their daughters bedroom door, Lilly and Leigh saw the tree had touched her mezzanine. She was covered in plaster and a broken mirror.
“We dug her out from underneath it all. It was so dark, the wind was blowing 100kms an hour and it had gone through our kitchen so it was now raining inside,” Lilly said.
After packing what they could, the family of six made their way out the front but quickly found themselves trapped – with another tree having torn up their brand new driveway.
“We were just standing out there in the middle of the storm – just trapped – with rain and wind raging. We could hear branches and trees just dropping. It was like Armageddon,” Leigh said.
The family sheltered at their neighbours home until daylight broke, and it wasn’t until then that they started to see what had actually happened to their home.
“I went for a walk around and just thought, ‘oh my god’. It hit our street with vengeance. Trees fell down like dominos, people’s houses were crushed, cars were crushed,” Leigh explained.
“Just thinking that you’ve lost your family, it was so traumatic. We were just in shock for days. We were homeless. We felt like refugees. Our neighbours behind us took us in that night and fed us and looked after us, they did whatever they could,” Lilly said.
Over the next few days, Leigh and Lilly would slowly walk backwards and forwards from the neighbours to what was their house, trying to make sense of what had happened as news crews snapped pictures and asked for interviews.
“By Saturday, all our friends came up with chainsaws and brooms and just pitched in to help clean up as much as we could. The support of everybody was overwhelming,” Lilly said.
“We sent the kids off to different friends’ houses and we stayed in a friend’s bungalow in our street. We just needed to be close to the house to work things out. We were all separated, and that was really difficult to be away from the kids,” she added.
The family ended up in an Airbnb for about a month while going through the insurance process.
“The whole community was devastated – not just our house. I couldn’t get to sleep after it, all I could picture wasn’t even our house but just our entire street, it was demolished. All the areas, the landscape had changed, the forest had been thinned out. Trees had snapped like matchsticks and just seeing it all around us was horrible,” Lilly said.
The family now reside in a Lilydale rental with weekly rent footed by their insurer for 12 months. But with Covid-19 lockdowns leading to delays in the construction industry, the family can only hope their home will be liveable before their time is up.
“I think, with the lockdown, it’s been difficult to be separated from our community. All the kids aren’t anywhere near their friends and lockdowns themselves are traumatic enough. It was very difficult to move and pack up when it’s not your choice to leave your house,” Lilly said.
Leigh and Lilly had spent the last three years renovating their home and had a new driveway put in just two weeks before the storm tore it up. They also previously had a tree fall on their bathroom and had recently renovated the space before it was again crushed.
“It’s just never ending,” Lilly said. But even that string of events can’t turn the family off life in the Hills, with the community spirit shown after the storm further instilling the reasons they love living in the Dandenongs.
“We are very grateful that our family is alive, they are all so resilient and happy. The kids are just amazing actually and the support of our friends has been wonderful. Our community has just showered us in love and support and just everyone has been amazing. It’s such a compassionate community,” Lilly said.
Leigh, who works in climate science at Monash, is now looking at researching the path of the storm to understand how it moved through the Dandenongs to potentially identify areas of interest for future events.
