By ANEEKA SIMONIS
A PAKENHAM family made a miracle escape earlier this week after a freak lightning strike destroyed the roof of their home.
Phoebe Bardella said her four-month-old baby and two-year-old son were sitting with their grandma on the couch directly underneath the lightning bolt strike which caused the roof to collapse within seconds.
“We heard a massive bang and then a split-second later the celling was on top of us,” the shocked mum recalled.
“I just stood up and pulled it off my head and started screaming for my baby… I think Oliver had come over to me… mum picked up the baby and we all scrambled out the front door.
“We thought it may catch on fire or collapse more so we just got out as fast as we could.”
Phoebe’s mother, Toni Bardella, who was forced to duck and weave her way out of the collapsed Park Boulevard home, narrowly avoided an exposed live wire which dangled directly above their heads on the couch.
“We had to crawl over the plaster sheeting to get out,” she said.
“It was the loudest noise I’d ever heard.
“I thought that maybe there was a bomb or the end of the world had come.”
The damaging lightning bolt struck the family’s Pakenham rental at about 1pm on Monday 23 February not long after a severe weather warning was issued.
Phoebe said it was fate that her two-year-old son did not take his regularly noon nap because a picture frame hanging above his cot was blown off the wall by the strike and would likely have seriously injured the sleeping toddler.
“Right where his pillow is… a glass picture frame blew off the wall… it would have landed on his head,” she said.
Phoebe’s partner Warwick Bourke, who works an hour away in Lilydale, said he made it back to his shaken family within a half hour of their emergency call.
The lightning bolt also blew an air conditioning unit off the wall and collapsed several parts of the ceiling.
State Emergency Services (SES) was first on the scene, followed by police, paramedics and the CFA.
“It took SES an hour and 45 minutes to clean up.
“When I got home they were in the roof, patching up holes and getting all the power shut off,” Warwick said.
Phoebe, who has minor bruising on her head, said she was the only one injured by the freak accident.
Her neighbours, who are away on holidays for the next week, have offered their home as temporary accommodation.
The family, which also includes two children aged seven and 10 who were at school at the time of the incident, do not know when they will be able to move back into their home.
