A lightning strike blasted holes in a runway at Brisbane Airport on Tuesday afternoon, forcing emergency repairs and closing the runway for more than eight hours.
Footage shared by the airport shows the strike hit the western runway about 3.11pm, leaving a scattering of holes – some roughly palm-sized – across a section of bitumen.
Brisbane Airport spokesperson Peter Doherty said engineers were immediately deployed to assess the runway, which was closed for emergency repairs.
“The lightning hit the centre of the runway, creating damage,” Doherty said.
“[Engineers] had to cut out the affected areas and re-asphalt them.
“They spent the evening working on it and had it restored at 11.52pm.”
He said lightning was common around the airport but such damage to a runway was rare.
“I spoke to the guy who looks after the runway. He’s been there 27 years and he hadn’t seen something like [what we saw] yesterday.”
While the strike and broader storm activity caused delays, no flights were cancelled on Tuesday, and the airport was operating as usual on Wednesday.
“There are two runways two kilometres apart: one was out of action, the other [eastern runway] kept going through that time,” Doherty said.
“We’ve done some numbers and there was an average 48-minute delay through that period in the afternoon, with storm activity around.
“It’s business as usual today.”
Severe storms began moving through parts of south-east Queensland from about 1pm on Tuesday, with areas of the Gold Coast and Ipswich hit by large hail stones.
Other regions copped heavy bursts of rain and damaging winds.
“The wind gusts at our weather station verified damaging winds … [which caused] a bit of tree damage,” said senior meteorologist David Crock, from the Bureau of Meteorology.
“And we had the right conditions for storms to get strong enough for large, or giant hail, which is over five centimetres in diameter.”
Tuesday’s storms lasted until about 5pm, Crock said. No storms are expected in Brisbane on Wednesday.
“It’s more likely to be rain moving through the west of Brisbane, and then beyond tomorrow, it will be a bit cooler,” Crock said.
Thursday and Friday were expected to be drier than the start of the week, though rain was likely to return at the weekend.
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