Storms

During my blog absence we had a few tropical cyclones that added a bit of excitement to life. In December we had Sarai, which was a bit of a fizzer here, then Tino in January, which brought quite a bit of damage to Tongatapu as a Category 3 Severe Tropical Cyclone but up here in Vava'u we remained mostly unscathed. In April we had Cyclone Harold hit us. In all of these cyclones we happened to be on the leeward side of the island so although we shuttered our windows we didn't even bother lowering our verandah roof. All the storms claimed a few trees in the forest and a papaya tree or two but otherwise mostly just made a bit of a mess.

This view from the house kinda gives an idea of the winds from Tino on the leeward side of the island:

I create satellite animations of the storms on youtube when they are happening at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCArkblSqsuHliuWqcUgZD3w/videos and have an animation maker at http://offloop.net/cgi-bin/sat.pl for current weather since we don't have a fancy rain radar here in Tonga.

So the forecast storms were not a huge deal for us, however, just last week we had an un-forecast and totally unexpected storm cell develop and blow past and this time we weren't on the leeward side of the island. It was a lovely calm morning when I visited the loo, but 5 minutes later trees were falling down around me. I made a dash for the house and just as I opened the door our verandah roof was torn off above me and blew away into the forest. If we had any warning we could have lowered the verandah roof but as it was the wind just snapped the support poles, peeled open the hinges and the verandah roof sailed off over the house making a small dent in the topcap of the house but otherwise leaving the house mostly unharmed. It did also tear off the security shutter over the "window" on the front of the house so we had no way to secure a tarp to stop the rain from blowing in. We put a tarp over the bed and put all the electronics stuff into cupboards but the horizontal rain pretty much flooded into the house. But within an hour the storm was gone and after thinking about it for another hour the sun came out so the day was spent drying out and clearing up.

A coconut tree came down near the house and another two large tress fell down next to the house but no harm done there. The tree that our header tank is in snapped off just above the tank but the tank miraculously stayed in the tree:

The shelter over the pizza oven was destroyed:

Our verandah roof (other half just visible on the left-hand side):

We found the verandah roof about 50 m into the forest. It must have flown on a crazy angle like a giant frisbee to get to where it did, dodging trees along the way but finally found a big tree and smashed into two pieces. We will be able to use most of the roofing tin again but most of the timber is broken. The winds have been a bit too high since the storm to tow new building supplies over from the mainland but it should calm down in the next few days and we'll rebuild.

In the harbour 3 boats were sunk in the storm and two smashed on the rocks.