Australia Weather News
A Glenelg North unit block had part of its roof removed. - ABC
Several homes in Adelaide have been left in ruins and 16,000 properties are still without power following destructive wild weather last night.
The sheer force of overnight winds removed roofs from houses and brought down trees and powerlines, with gusts of almost 100 kilometres per hour recorded at Adelaide Airport.
About 100,000 properties have been impacted or had power outages since 10:00am yesterday.
Surinder Kumar was home with his pregnant wife at their apartment in Glenelg North, west of Adelaide, when they were forced to flee after its roof blew off.
"It was very scary. We left everything at home and we just ran," he said.
The State Emergency Service (SES) has been overwhelmed by call-outs and has responded to about 800 incidents since Wednesday afternoon.
Another Glenelg North resident told ABC Radio Adelaide his unit's roof was blown off just before 10:00pm.
"[There's] nothing in here — just the walls… some of our neighbours — their ceiling's gone," he said.
"Within five minutes, you are like homeless… it's very dangerous because of all the wires."
SA Power Networks said its crews had been working for up to 16 hours since the weather intensified.
Homeowners have been advised they could be waiting until Friday to have their power switched back on.
"There may be some people without power into tomorrow given the number of outages, but we will do everything we can to avoid that," spokesperson Paul Roberts said.
"We're still getting reports in as people are waking up this morning… so it may get a little bit worse before we can start making it better.
"We've had the winds continuing overnight and our crews really battling a situation where as we restored power, repaired wires down, more reports were coming in constantly overnight due to the winds continuing well into this morning.
"Fresh crews are in the depots being briefed and we're working through the jobs we have to continue the task of restoring power."
Neptune Island hit hardest
The strongest gust across the state recorded was 132 kilometres per hour at Neptune Island and a severe weather warning for damaging winds remains current for several districts.
The Bureau of Meteorology said a deep low pressure system had moved across the state, bringing up to 40 millimetres of rain over the Adelaide Hills.
"We measured genuine gale force winds at Adelaide Airport for about six hours and had gusts up to 98 kilometres per hour," meteorologist Peter Webb said.
"Those sustained gale force winds also lifted the tide levels by 1.6 metres, so fortunately that sustained period of gale force winds also corresponded to the low tide, else we'd have been in real trouble.
"There would have been flooding round the port and all sorts of things, so we dodged a bit of a bullet there.
"The low was really quite deep. What happens with a low pressure system — the cloud spirals into the centre of the low, just like you see in a tropical cyclone or a hurricane or typhoon, so showing similar characteristics without the pure wind strength we get in those."
Conditions are expected to ease today, but not in time for the Lifesaving World Championships which are being held at Glenelg beach.
Events have again been postponed after the event's safety committee made a risk assessment.
"It was determined that the water at Glenelg is still too hazardous to compete in and as such all ocean events are cancelled for today," organisers said on Facebook.
"Reviews are taking place continuously and a further update around ocean events will be provided this afternoon."
ABC