DESPITE claims that wild weather swept through Ballarat on Saturday, the Bureau of Meteorology said it was simply a "stock standard windy winter's day".BOM senior forecaster Scott Williams said the winter damage during the weekend was nowhere near as extensive as in South Australia last week, where winds reached up to 120km/h."Yes it was a windy day but there wasn't a terrible amount of damage caused and Victoria wasn't badly affected," Mr Williams said."We are expecting another cold front to come through later on Tuesday with a period of rain but it won't be quite as windy as Saturday."Mr Williams said the weekend weather came as no surprise."We've gone passed the shortest day but traditionally July doesn't really warm up much and it's the coldest month of the year," he said."We might get the odd day that is a bit milder but we won't expect sustained mild weather until mid to late August."Winds reached gusts of 80km/h on Saturday, with 7.2 millimetres of rainfall during the weekend.Although receiving close to 200 calls across the state, State Emergency Services were only called to 20 jobs in Ballarat with 25 volunteer responders sent out.The first call was received at 2.30am and the last at 8.50pm.Yesterday, they were called to a Mt Clear home, which narrowly escaped damage from fallen trees.A branch of a tree had fallen on to the roof of Scott Whitelaw's home in Hale Avenue, which stopped further damage when another tree fell on top of that.Mr Whitelaw discovered the tree when he woke up yesterday morning, having slept through the wild weather."When I came out it was such a shock to see the tree and we were really lucky," he said.The SES said compared to early June when statewide crews were called out to 1000 jobs, the weekend work was insignificant."(Saturday) was actually quite a minor day there was just a long period of time where calls slowly trickled in," SES duty officer Catherine Ogata said.Sebastopol, Mt Clear and Buninyong were the areas affected most by the winds, with trees down and minor roof damage.Today is mostly sunny with northerly winds of up to 35km/h.The temperature will reach a minimum of 4 degrees and a maximum of 11.
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