'Giant twister' is something to spout about

Source: The Daily Telegraph

ERIN Townsend was having lunch with friends on her Long Beach balcony yesterday when the temperature suddenly dropped and the sky turned black.

Then they saw the roaring water spout about 1km out to sea.

"We just saw this giant twister with all this water swirling around in it," Ms Townsend, 27, said.

"I've definitely not seen anything like it before."

As severe storms battered the south and northeast of the state over the weekend, a water spout appeared off Long Beach, at Batemans Bay on the south coast about 2pm yesterday - lasting about 15 minutes.

Ms Townsend's friend Michael Syne took photographs of the water spout as it moved from the middle of Long Beach around the headland before breaking up.

"We had been swimming just 10 minutes before that and all of a sudden it got really cold. In that 10 minutes, it became really windy and no one was out on the beach or swimming," she said.

Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Mick Logan didn't have specific details on the size of yesterday's spout but said they can reach speeds of up to 160km/h.

He said a southerly change coupled with a looming thunderstorm created the spout.

"They're more common coming in to winter than at this time of year ... and they're still pretty rare, which is what makes this one so impressive," he said.

The Weather Channel's chief meteorologist Dick Whitaker said thunderstorms and driving rains which lashed the south coast and parts of the north coast near the Queensland border were easing overnight and today.

One house was destroyed and about a dozen others severely damaged at Woodburn, south of Ballina, on Saturday night.

The SES said strong winds that brought down power lines left about 2000 homes without power, while emergency services were called out to 120 clean-up jobs yesterday.

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