KURRAWAN St resident Maxine Solomons was just heading onto Goonoo Goonoo Rd, with her granddaughter, Jazzmin, in the back seat of her car, when Monday’s storm unleashed its fury in South Tamworth.
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She’d just picked the seven-year-old up from school and was on her way home.
Mrs Solomons reckons she was nearly wiped out by a bus which was also trying to negotiate the blinding rain and hail – but tucked in behind it and crawled towards getting off the road into a parking spot.
Before she could, a tree branch came crashing through the back windscreen, terrifying the little girl and her grandmother.
“It was horrific. I was just so glad for that bus, in the end – it was like my guideline from the roundabout,” Mrs Solomons said yesterday.
“I was blinded. You couldn’t see anything in front of you.
“Jazz was sitting in the back seat and then there was just this hell of a bang; I looked and the tree branch was at the window and it just flew past.
“It was just so scary; it was horrible.
“Jazz screamed and I just told her to climb over the back seat.
“She was just hysterical.
“I could pull over then and we just huddled in the car.”
She was only about 50m from her home street at the time.
The two waited it out until the fury of the storm passed.
“We just sat there until it cleared. But the front window got smashed, too, from the hail – there were just so many hailstones banging into the car. It was horrific.”
Mrs Solomons rang the ambulance and has praised their swift and caring response.
Jazzmin was peppered with glass from the shattered window. Her gran spent a fair while getting tiny little starspots of it off her skin and out of her hair.
“She has a few little cuts on her arms and both her legs and her fingers, but she was very, very distressed,” Mrs Solomons said.
Her 15-year-old imported Chrysler car is the worse for wear.
“It’s got so many dents and I hate to think what the cost of that might be,” she said.