Bunbury’s Hockey community bands together to get stadium back to being game-ready following Friday’s tornado

Members of the South West’s hockey community have come together to repair the Bunbury Hockey Stadium after it sustained damage in Friday’s freak tornado. More than 75 volunteers from as far as Busselton and Harvey gathered on Tuesday night to work on the ground, which had suffered significant damage and was littered with debris. Remarkably, the group was able to clean the space up in just a matter of hours. Bunbury Hockey Association Masters coordinator Dean Lomax said they were lucky to not get hit by the worst of the storm, but it still left damage to the goals, artificial turf and scoreboard. “The goal boxes were completely annihilated, I think we’ve only got about ... four left of the main turf goals, and then about 10 of our bigger, heavier ones, which are out in the grass field for our junior players, we’ve lost about 10 of those as well,” he said. “Our scoreboard on turf two got destroyed and then there were lots of parts where things had gone flying across the turf — on turf two it had dug in and torn up a lot of the turf and got in the substrate below. “There’s a couple of smaller holes on turf one, but we’ll hopefully be able to patch those up before the weekend. “Our lighting towers didn’t get damaged but they (wind gusts) were so strong and actually turned all the lights around on the top row.” The storm also caused significant damage to the neighbouring Hay Park grass pitches and fencing as well as ripping apart a section of the nearby PCYC building. While the secondary turf will remain out of action in the foreseeable future, the efforts of authorities and volunteers meant hockey will return to the stadium on Friday. Mr Lomax said the community’s work was invaluable with businesses also chipping in, including Halifax Lunch Supply keeping volunteers fed. “You cannot put a price on how valuable that is for the association and it means that we’ve only lost one weekend of fixtures and we’re all back on playing again from Friday night,” he said. “Having 75 people out there and just getting into it and really going for it, we gave everybody a safety briefing first before we started work so everybody knew what the deal was and then everybody just got out there and got the work done.”