Andamooka display section

page 7

A view of a storm having moved through Andamooka

The photo below is  as close to photographing one of the fabled Andamooka thunderstorms as I have gotten.  It doesn't look much in this photo, and that's the opinion I held of the storm at the time.  But it kept coming in lower and darker.  This photo was taken on the last day of one particular trip that I made to Andamooka.  If I had been able to stay another day I would have got some unbelievable photos.  We had left Andamooka and were driving home in the afternoon when we struck this storm about 12 km to the west of the town.  The storm itself had turned day to night.  The lightning that occurred turned the darkness back to daylight.  The lightning as we drove along the road on the way out (of Andamooka) was all around us.  The strikes were hitting the plains on either side of us and as there was no rain (at this stage) so we had a clear view of them all.  The strikes were so long lived, often lasting 2 - 4 seconds, which doesnt sound long but they seemed to stay there for an eternity.  Also because there were so many strikes you could look out the windows of the car and on a given side see up to 6 strikes occurring at any one time.  The only way to imagine this is to imagine dark grey clouds over the plains like the one above and then imagine it bathed in the bluish lightning light and then just imagine lightning bolts just sitting there poking up out of the ground and not moving that is what it was like.  Quite often the lightning struck really close to the car.  I swear there were times the car was being rocked by the force of the sound waves from the thunder.  There was one close strike I recall vividly, it struck just behind the car.  I was looking out of the front windscreen at the time, the light was so bright everything seemed to go a pure white and the only other thing I could see in front of us was the shadow of our car which stood out in a black contrast to the whiteness of everything else.  I guess the storm lasted like this for about ten to fifteen  minutes but it seemed to last forever.  Then the lightning died down and made way for some of the heaviest rain I have ever seen.  The road at the time was dirt for a large part of the way (again see above) and I was worried that we would not make it to the sealed road before the road became impassable and that we (or the car at least) would be stuck for days.  But we made it OK, we had to drive slow along the bitumen while the visibility due to the rain was low and by Woomera there was little more than cloud around.  I can guarantee I will never forget this storm and I eagerly await another one like it.