Australia Weather News

A huge clean-up is underway in Perth's north after an unexpected severe storm event dumped more than 130 millimetres of rain on several suburbs.

Parts of Clarkson and Butler were among the worst hit on Friday afternoon, leaving locals and authorities to assess the damage this morning.

Several streets in Clarkson were left with tree damage, flooded parks and large debris around homes after yesterday afternoon's flash flooding.

It was a close call for hairdresser Diana Weaver who was working in a shopping centre in Clarkson when parts of the ceiling collapsed in front of her.

"We just heard like a massive rain noise," she said.

"We didn't even know it was raining, and within 10 minutes the water started coming through the lights.

"We put some chairs out and then — boom — it all collapsed in."

Ms Weaver said she was still attending to customers in the salon even after the roof collapsed.

"The funny bit was we still had clients with half foils, so we started foiling out on the couches."

Sruchir Sheh's two cars were submerged when the heavy rain caused flash flooding in Riverlinks Park in front of his Clarkson house.

"Around 1:30pm the rain started, and within 15 to 20 minutes the water was everywhere and I couldn't remove the cars," he said.

"I thought if I'm going to move them now, the water might go inside the car itself so I didn't try that."

Mr Sheh said he was hopeful insurance would cover the cost of damage to his vehicles.

Locals say flooding has happened before

Others in the area said it was not the first-time low-lying streets in Clarkson had been impacted.

Tessa Schumacher was walking her two dogs around the park this morning to survey the damage.

"I definitely think that the council should do something about these low-lying areas. It's a bit concerning," she said.

"In winter it always floods and this is a normal occurrence [but] I've never seen it this bad before."

Other locals said the flooding around Clarkson was the worst they had seen.

The City of Wanneroo said it was "actively investigating impacts on local infrastructure" after receiving calls about damage overnight.

"Our priority is the safety and wellbeing of our community members, and over the coming days, our teams will be working to assess and restore any damage," a spokesperson said.

"We understand the concerns you have shared, and when the initial clean-up is completed, our focus will shift to a thorough examination of City infrastructure in the affected zones."

From zero to severe in 30 minutes

Many on social media have been critical of the Bureau of Meteorology for failing to forecast the sudden wet weather.

But duty forecaster Luke Huntington said the complex nature of the weather system made it difficult to issue an alert any earlier than it did.

"With severe thunderstorms they are very complex and they do change very rapidly, so it can go from basically nothing to sort of severe within half an hour," he said.

Mr Huntington said thunderstorms had been forecast in north-western coastal suburbs yesterday morning, but there were no severe thunderstorms forecast for later in the afternoon.

"We've been quite dry in the last month so this was a very unusual event," he said.

"The outlook for the next week or two is back to dry and warm conditions."