The June 2007 Hunter Region and Central Coast storms commenced on Friday, 8 June 2007, following the development of an intense coastal low pressure system during the previous night. Over the next 36 hours these areas were battered by the system's strong winds and torrential rain, which caused extensive flooding, damage, loss of life and the grounding of a 225 m (738 ft) long bulk carrier.
The New South Wales Premier, Morris Iemma, declared a natural disaster for the affected areas. More than 105,000 homes had been left without power. Rainfall had exceeded 300 mm (12 in) in the Hunter region and 200 mm (8 in) in parts of the Central Coast and Sydney. Nearly 6,000 State Emergency Service volunteers, including crews from across New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and Victoria worked in the area, having responded to over 10,000 calls for assistance.
A family of four and a nephew were killed when a section of road collapsed under their car as they drove along the Pacific Highway at Somersby on the Central Coast. Two people died when their four-wheel drive was swept off a bridge by floodwaters at Clarence Town and a man died near Lambton when he was swept into a storm-water drain. The following day, a man died when a tree fell onto his vehicle at Brunkerville. Another man died during a house fire that, it is believed, was started by a candle being used during the blackouts caused by the storm. The total death toll rose to 10.
The unladen bulk carrier MV Pasha Bulker ran aground on Nobbys Beach at Newcastle, after its captain failed to heed a warning to move out to sea to escape the approaching storm. The Newcastle Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter Service used both of their aircraft to winch the Pasha Bulker crew of 22 to safety, transporting them to Nobbys Beach parking lot. However, on completion of the rescue, the aircraft had to abandon the flight back to their Broadmeadow base due lack of visibility and dangerously strong winds.
On the evening of Sunday 10 June, approximately 4,000 residents in riverside communities of central Maitland, South Maitland and Lorn were forced to evacuate their homes in anticipation that the Hunter River would breach its levee system. Evacuation centres were set up at East Maitland and Maitland High School. However by the morning of 11 June the flood water had peaked without breaking the levee bank.
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“In June the bush we call
alder was heavy, listless,
its leaves studded with galls,
growing wherever we didn’t
want it.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Forced from home, and all its pleasures,
Afric’s coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger’s treasures,
O’er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though theirs they have enroll’d me,
Minds are never to be sold.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
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—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)