Bureau warns of wet week across Gippsland

Soaked: A flooded Tyers Road back in 2018. file photograph

TOM GANNON

A severe weather warning has been issued for Central, South West and parts of East Gippsland as the region prepares for a week-long, wet weather shellacking.

The region will start to see the big wet making its way across Victoria with potential damaging winds averaging around 60 to 70 km/h with peak gusts of around 90km/h later today and early tomorrow morning.

According to The Bureau of Meteorology Duty Forecaster Christie Johnson, these northerly winds will send a low pressure system to Victoria from the NSW coast with a mammoth amount of rain predicted for Wednesday and Thursday.

“On Wednesday we are looking at wide spread rain fall of 30 to 60 millimetres through Gippsland and 70 to 100 millimetres on the ranges,” she said.

“Thursday it will continue so across the two days we’re looking at something like 60 to 100 millimetres across Gippsland over both Wednesday and Thursday and possibly 150 to 250 millimetres about the ranges.”

Ms Johnson said a lighter version of this rain should hang around for the weekend.

“The low is actually very slow moving so well see showers continue into Gippsland on Friday and Saturday and to some extent Sunday as they will be easing then,” she said.

Ms Johnson added that we should be wary of flooding as such large amounts of rain will add to our already saturated water systems.

“There’s a risk of flooding particularly because there was recent flooding in East Gippsland, the catchments are pretty wet there,” she said.

“We do see that sort of thing with these low pressure systems, they do quite often cause flooding, whether it’s going to be minor, moderate or major, the hydro team will be collecting more information on that.”

This weather front won’t be great for those of us looking to stay warm as temperatures aren’t expected to reach higher than 15 degrees for the rest of the week.

It should however help the upcoming snow season with the rainfall expected to produce a healthy amount of snow, and maybe a blizzard or two.

“It looks like the snow level drops to around 900 to 1000 metres behind the front tomorrow, meaning there will be some quite heavy snow at the resorts with the rainfall coming in,” Ms Johnson said.

“We could well see blizzards with those very strong winds wrapping around the low and heavy snow, there’s even a risk of the winds up on the ranges on Wednesday reaching our destructive wind category.”