Australians are familiar with the ravages of drought, bushfire and flood, but severe storms are the nation's most costly natural disasters, according to financial analysts.
Storms are unpredictable, often ferocious and people are rarely prepared for them.
They're also one of the most difficult weather events to predict long term, but atmospheric scientist Kim Reid says there is a general consensus that storms will become more intense, yet less frequent, as climate change progresses.
"We just have this extra energy in the climate system now and, in the future when we get these storms, they are likely to be quite intense," Dr Reid said.
Severe storms can bring with them giant hail stones, dangerous and destructive winds, and treacherous flash-flooding — posing not only a risk to property, but to lives.
During winter last year, an extreme storm hit large parts of the country's east coast, with Victoria bearing the brunt.
Winds in excess of 100kph damaged trees, homes and critical infrastructure, cutting power to more than 300,000 homes and businesses, some of which remained without electricity for weeks.
It hit hardest in the hilly Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne, where winds of more than 125kph tore down power lines and sent towering blackwoods and eucalypts crashing through houses.
Kalorama Country Fire Authority (CFA) captain Bill Robinson, who has lived locally for nearly 40 years, said he had never experienced anything like the storm that struck on the evening of June 9 last year and raged all night.
"We really weren't prepared for it," he said.
"I know the SES says that you should be prepared for storms, you should put things away and make sure things are tied down … but we were really totally unprepared for the whole thing."
"The CFA wasn't prepared, Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) weren't prepared for it."
A report released on the anniversary of the disaster by EMV, described it as "one of the single largest operational events in Victoria State Emergency Service's history" and the state's largest power outage event.
"We've never seen anything like it up here," Mr Robinson said.
"We'd seen trees fall over, and we'd seen big branches and we know we've got big trees but this stuff was just enormous.
"This storm lasted all night. It just blew hard all night, and it just didn't stop."
EMV's report detailed a litany of shortcomings including delays in warnings, information and weather predictions, as well as knowledge gaps in communities' storm preparation.
Community surveys after the disaster found 60 per cent of residents did not think they were at risk and only 13 per cent had an emergency plan for a storm event.
Half of those surveyed said they were not confident in how to access warnings and information for a future extreme weather event.
So why are communities so unprepared for such dangerous weather?
The boy who cried wolf
The term "storm" is a bit murky and all-encompassing — it can mean anything from a thunderstorm to a tropical cyclone.
Australia's storm season begins in September. Dean Narramore, from the Bureau of Meteorology, says it usually lasts until March or April.
The next few months are forecast to be particularly wet for northern and eastern Australia, which also makes the conditions conducive to harmful storms.
"A wet year doesn't mean we're going to have more of them, it just means if they do occur, there's probably going to be more rainfall with them," Mr Narramore said.
"There's more moisture around the country. That means there's a higher chance that when the weather systems do come through that we do see more storm activity."
Larger systems like tropical cyclones and low pressure systems can be predicted about a week out according to Dr Reid, a scientist at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
But most storms, especially thunderstorms, are hard to forecast with much accuracy.
"One of the great challenges of forecasting extreme weather events is that you want to forecast when something occurs, but you want to balance it so that you're not crying wolf too often, because then people won't take your forecast seriously," Dr Reid said.
"But because extreme weather is so hard to forecast, and there are a lot of false alarms, it's very tricky to get that balance right."
She says it is often hard to pinpoint exactly where the damage will occur.
"We can predict the passage of a front for example, but knowing at what time exactly it's going to pass through can really have a big impact on the eventual damage," Dr Reid said.
"If a thunderstorm forms 10 kilometres north from where we thought it was going to, scientifically that's quite a good forecast. But for a person who wasn't expecting their town to get hit with an intense hailstorm, that's a terrible forecast."
Learning from past losses
It's not only getting the science of forecasting right that's difficult, interpreting and communicating the danger of storms is also a challenge, with the EMV report into the 2021 storms stating that forecasts are often too complex for many to understand.
"It was noted by both emergency management personnel and the community that warnings and information were felt to be delayed, particularly in the early stages of the event.
This was potentially due to a lack of understanding by some emergency management personnel regarding how to effectively utilise Bureau of Meteorology products and information to communicate the confidence levels and potential size and severity of the event."
CFA captain Bill Robinson agreed the warnings were inadequate.
"The warnings needed to go out earlier and since then, EMV have said that they realise they were slow in doing all that," Mr Robinson said.
"And the last lot of floods and stuff that we've had around the area EMV have been sending out a whole heap of messages."
The report also found knowledge gaps in both the community and emergency management around the dangers the conditions posed, including knowledge of wind predictions and measurement of strength and direction.
Just as our communication and warnings for bushfires have evolved in the aftermath of disasters and a changing climate, storms may have to undergo a similar transformation.
There is already some movement, with a nationally consistent Australian Warning System developed for all types of disasters, that is now being rolled out across the country.
Why do storms cost so much?
Warnings are important because they help communities prepare for what's to come and limit damage.
While other natural disasters cause immense destruction in Australia, Claire Ibrahim from Deloitte Access Economics says storms stack up as the most expensive.
"The latest data shows us that the economic costs of storms, whether it's the flood impacts from severe storm damage and hail all the way through to tropical cyclones, taken together they are the most costly types of natural disaster events that Australia experiences," she said.
"The high costs of storms across Australia come from the damages to assets, or the financial costs — and actually really high social costs — that communities experience from the impacts of these events."
A big driver of that cost is hail damage, with the Insurance Council of Australia reporting Sydney’s 1999 hailstorm was the most expensive disaster in Australia with insurance claims costing $5.5 billion.
This year's destructive floods that swept through South East Queensland and NSW sit in second spot, causing $5.3 billion in insured losses.
Cyclone Tracey, which struck Darwin early on Christmas Day in 1974, killed 71 people and devastated 80 per cent of the city, resulting in insurance claims of $5 billion.
But storms also occur on a smaller scale more often than other disasters and tend to hit large population centres.
"Everything is coastally concentrated, it's dense, you've got increased urbanisation," Ms Ibrahim said.
"Property values are obviously increasing over time as part of that and so, as the value of that property gets higher, the damage costs get higher.
"But also as the population gets bigger, there's essentially more assets and more property to be damaged as well."
Between 2005-2022 the federal government spent nearly $24 billion on disaster recovery and relief and only $0.51 billion on resilience.
The new Labor government is trying to address that by establishing a Disaster Ready Fund that will provide up to $200 million a year for mitigation projects.
But Ms Ibrahim says there needs to be more policy action around planning and investment in mitigation, including reforms to building standards and quality, land use planning and infrastructure.
"If we're not thinking about these things, at the same time as we do recovery from events and from storm activity … the costs can compound year on year and that's only going to get worse," Ms Ibrahim said.
"The more information we can get, the better prepared we can be and while we can't completely avoid the cost of these events, we can certainly minimise them."
Will climate change make storms worse?
How a warming planet will affect storm activity isn't as certain as some other weather patterns, like heat, according to climate scientist Dr Simon Bradshaw.
But, he says, the science is very robust.
"You're dealing with a slightly more complex set of factors and patterns, so it can be harder to predict some of these extreme storm events," he said.
"But definitely everything we see these days has the fingerprints of climate change and of that hotter, wetter, more energetic atmosphere."
Dr Bradshaw says there are many practical measures that Australia could be taking to prepare for and mitigate against storm events.
"Having great early warning systems, access to really good local information on what the risks are, is crucially important," he said.
"Really investing in the resilience of communities in every sense, whether that's putting in place the infrastructure that's needed to climate-proof different areas, or whether it's really — and this is so important — listening to communities about what risks, what strengths they have there.
"That kind of community-driven, bottom-up work is so important, and we've seen that so strongly this year."
Back in the Kalorama hills CFA captain Bill Robinson agrees that communities have to learn to be self-sufficient.
"This was the problem with the [Dandenong] storm, a lot of the places the emergency services could not get to these people," he said.
"I think that was a big learning curve for the locals to find out what we've been telling them for a long time, that if we have a bushfire don't expect a fire truck on every doorstep and people learned that they had to look after themselves.
"It's just part of being human, I think you cope with what's there."
