Severe storms devastate WA harvest with hail, floods and lightning fires

Across Western Australia's grain country, the night of November 5th brought a reckoning. Severe thunderstorms swept through the Wheatbelt and Great Southern regions with hail, torrential rain, and lightning so intense that the Bureau of Meteorology recorded more than 250,000 strikes in a single 24-hour period. For farmers in the middle of harvest—the most time-sensitive and economically crucial weeks of the year—the timing could not have been worse.

Brookton, a farming town 130 kilometres east of Perth, bore the brunt. The town recorded 50.2 millimetres of rainfall on Wednesday afternoon, the highest total in the affected area, though South Burracoppin to the east reported even heavier falls exceeding 100 millimetres. The storms did not discriminate: 50,000 lightning strikes tore through the Central Wheatbelt and Great Southern alone. Murray Hall, a Brookton farmer, spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning surveying his property. He found two sheep dead, struck by lightning. His canola crop—seeds scattered across the ground—showed what he described as extensive damage. In some nearby paddocks, the destruction was total. Barley fared little better, with losses ranging from 50 to 80 per cent across affected areas. Hall was already in contact with his insurance company, bracing for the financial weight of the losses.

The damage extended far beyond the paddocks. In Brookton itself, the shire president Rod Wallis reported significant harm to roads, with crews working through the night to make them passable again. Local businesses—a hairdresser, a hardware store—flooded and shuttered. The storms had turned infrastructure into liability. Agronomist David Keamy, surveying the eastern Wheatbelt near Merredin, found the destruction staggering in its scope and severity. Some areas had recorded up to 80 millimetres of rain in a matter of hours. Farmers in those zones were already writing off entire crops, accepting the loss rather than investing further resources in salvage.

But the storms brought more than water and hail. At Tammin, 180 kilometres east of Perth, wind gusts reached 65 kilometres per hour on Tuesday. A snapped tree branch struck a power line, igniting a fire that escalated to emergency level. Sheds burned. Unharvested crops—grain waiting in the field for the combine—went up in smoke. A meat processing business sustained minor damage. The fire advanced to the edge of the service station in town before firefighters contained it. Andrew Malone, the shire chief executive, acknowledged how close the outcome had come to catastrophe. The skill of the fire chief and control officers had made the difference between a contained incident and a town-threatening disaster.

Then came word of another fire at Yorkrakine, sparked by lightning. North-east of Perth, near Dalwallinu, farmer Steve Carter reported multiple lightning-started fires on Tuesday afternoon. Firefighters extinguished the worst; rain helped suppress the others. The storms had created a cascade of emergencies—water, wind, fire, electricity all weaponized by the weather system.

By Thursday morning, the meteorological drama had shifted. Senior meteorologist Jess Lingard noted that the thunderstorm complex had moved east into South Australia, leaving behind cloud cover and the wreckage of a harvest season interrupted at its most vulnerable moment. Farmers across the region faced the same grim arithmetic: assessing crop loss, filing insurance claims, and calculating what this single night would cost them. The storms had passed. The accounting was just beginning.