Hail kills goats, roos outright as it passes through Far West properties

David Langford, K Tank Station, said the storm killed about 400 kangaroos and about 150 of his prized Boer goats – through direct hits by hail.

Mr Langford estimated the damage at about $30,000, as well as fences damaged by flash flooding.

“The storm not only killed the animals but turned the saltbush into pulp,” he said. “It will take years for that to come back.” He’d lost about 4000ha of saltbush country. The rain though had filled dams. He received about 18mm around the homestead.

“I’m certainly glad I wasn’t out there in the hail. I’ve never seen animals knocked dead by hail before.” He said though his sheep had survived, maybe protected by their seven month wool growth.

A Boer goat can weigh up to 70 or 80 kilos. “We’d been feeding them to get through the drought,” Mr Langford said. The hail was so thick some people found it under bushes a day later. “I’m glad no one was injured. I wouldn’t have liked to have have put it to the test.”  The drought had made it hard for the Langfords and they’d just sold some young ewes to keep things ticking over. For the whole year they’ve had just 24.5 mm up until the hail storm. “We’re still back a lot on where we need to be.”

Storms were still hanging around the area this week. His neighbour Lachlan Gall had lost power to supply water for his stock.

“There are currently two Essential Energy power outages north east of Broken Hill, one is affecting us and is probably the cause of the power issue that has apparently cut phone service from Telstra’s Mount Dering tower (50kms north of Broken Hill),” Mr Gall said. 

“The power outage is a problem because the single bore that is supplying practically all our stock and domestic water is connected to the Grid, the bore is pumping 24/7 and we have very little reserves in our receiving tanks.  Also, we can’t make or receive any phone calls, and if it wasn’t for my satellite internet connection we wouldn’t be able to contact anyone in the event of an emergency.

“Mount Dering (and several other towers in the far west, including Andersons Hill and Mount Shannon) are ageing (and essential) pieces of infrastructure that struggle to meet modern day demands of voice and data, and don’t appear to have any redundancy built into them – such that if there is a failure everyone is off air until repairs are effected, Telstra cannot switch to a backup system in the meantime.  Apparently Telstra did upgrade Mount Dering from 3G to 4G recently, but it hasn’t make any discernable difference to the service we are receiving from it, and travellers in particular rely on it to communicate.”