Brisbane in Australia is cleaning up after a massive hail storm ripped through the city yesterday afternoon.
Officials said the storm was one of the worst seen in the country and the strongest to hit the city of Brisbane in three decades.
The storm rained hailstones the size of tennis balls on cars and buildings yesterday, flooding streets and injuring 39 people.
Gusts of up to 140km/h, as strong as a Category Two cyclone, also uprooted trees and brought down power lines.
In one of the more dramatic scenes, at least four light planes were flipped over at Archerfield Airport, 11km from Brisbane's central business district.
"It looks like the apocalypse," one resident told reporters.
He lived in an apartment building that had its metal roof wrenched off by the storm and blown more than 100 metres.
Queensland state Premier Campbell Newman said it was the "biggest storm that has hit Brisbane since 1985" but was grateful none of those injured were seriously hurt.
"It was a terrible storm, but thankfully no one's been seriously injured or worse," he told ABC radio.
It started as an ordinary cell south of Brisbane yesterday afternoon and tracked north, encountering moist air from sea breezes that helped it develop into a "supercell", the Bureau of Meteorology's Pradeep Singh said.
"A supercell has a vortex - the air is spinning around as it moves up. When that happens, it takes the moisture above the freezing level and keeps it there for a long time," the senior meteorologist said.
"Rain particles keep developing bigger and bigger into hail, and because the draft is so strong in supercells, they tend to stay for a long time up in the air and when they reach the right weight, they start dropping down."
The damage bill was estimated to rise above Aus$100m (€68m), the state's Transport Minister Scott Emerson said.
The Insurance Council of Australia described the storm as a catastrophic weather event and said it had so far received 3,200 claims of more than Aus$27 million (€18m).
Tens of thousands of homes and businesses remained without electricity as crews worked to restore the network.
Dozens of schools were closed, while hundreds of soldiers from the military's Emergency Support Force helped remove trees and debris off Brisbane's roads.
