One person taken to Frankston hospital after home collapses at Penny Lane in McCrae south-east of Melbourne
A house on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula has collapsed down a cliff in a landslide on Tuesday morning, with one person taken to hospital.
The house on Penny Lane in McCrae collapsed shortly before 9am on Tuesday.
Ambulance Victoria said paramedics had responded about 8.45am and one person, believed to be in a stable condition, had been taken to Frankston hospital.
A State Emergency Service operations manager, Chris Gregory, said multiple nearby homes remained a concern and six properties had been evacuated.
“A couple of them were vacant holiday homes and others had residents who were working with councils and other agencies to make sure they have a safe place to go,” Gregory told ABC Radio Melbourne.
The destroyed house was empty after being hit by a smaller landslide about a week earlier. It was being monitored by geotechnical engineering experts.
Authorities disconnected utility services in nearby properties and the Nepean Highway was closed between McCrae and Dromana.
“We do have a road closure in place and we’ll seek to lift that as soon as we possibly can,” Gregory said.
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Tanina Osborne, who swims in the area each morning, posted a video to Facebook from the scene, saying the house appeared to have fallen on to another property.
Osborne said she had heard an “almighty tumble, like a truckload of rock had just been dumped on the ground”.
“My husband and I ran across the road and I saw that this house had tumbled down the hill – I’ve just never seen anything like it,” she later said.
Osborne said a water outlet near their daily swimming spot had been gushing into the bay three weeks earlier due to a water main issue on a road above where the landside occurred.
An advice alert for the incident warned that the landslide could continue to move for days.
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Kim, a caller to Melbourne’s 3AW radio station, witnessed the landslide and said the house had landed at the back of another home.
She said she was driving to begin a morning walk when she noticed the house had collapsed.
“It’s behind other houses or units that are kind of at the front, and this house has completely crashed down … It’s landed into the back of another house,” she said.
There were two homes at the top of the hill that were not affected and units at street level were standing, Kim said.
“We had that big downpour two days ago,” she said, adding: “It’s a fairly steep incline that the houses are built on.”
