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The cliché about silver linings is more than just a metaphor at the University glasshouses.

Now that the 19 glass houses have all been repaired and restored following the 2010 hail storm, many of them are sporting a new lease of life with new thermal screens - or silver linings - which makes them useable all year round.

"So it's a literal case of the cloud that brought the hail storm having a silver lining," said Rob Creasy, Plant Growth Facility Manager in the School of Plant Biology.

The hailstones smashed the roofs and walls of every one of the glasshouses at the southern end of the Crawley campus destroying all but the two newest houses which, with 5mm toughened glass, fared best, with only three of the almost 1,000 sheets of glass in their walls and roofs being smashed.

"We could use these two, and a couple with wire-reinforced glass, for restricted use immediately after the storm," Mr Creasy said. "But even then, we had to wear extensive safety equipment, hard hats, glasses and gloves inside the houses with wire-reinforced glass because shards kept dropping. We tried to get glasshouse space from the Department of Agriculture and the CSIRO but it was premium planting time, the end of summer, and space was very tight.

"It was a traumatic time. There were plant breeding programs that had been going for five or ten years that were destroyed, with huge commercial consequences. And while insurance can cover loss of salaries and plants and equipment and infrastructure, there are some things it can't replace.

"Our first job was to get the PhD and post-docs' research back up and running. Avoiding gaps in teaching, research and publication outputs are something we were hoping to avoid for both the University and individuals.

"There was so much destruction, so much lost, that even I choked back a tear from time to time. For some, careers were threatened."

International students, who make up more than half the postgraduate numbers in Plant Biology, had to extend their stays, their visas, their living allowances and scholarships. Even though insurance helped with that, it was a difficult time for many of them too, being far from home and their family support networks, with some of them losing up to a year's work.

"Our first job was to salvage and consolidate what could be saved into the four useable houses," Mr Creasy said. "Then we had to get rid of all the glass and ruined experiments and wrap the houses with horticultural plastic.

"During repairs, Len Zuks, a welder and artist from the Facilities Management workshop, cheered us all up with the funny little patterns and smiley faces he drew in glue on some of the walls.

"It sounds silly, but they really provided us with some light in those dark days," he said.

It took a couple of months for the clean-up to be complete and for the plant experiments to be started up again. Then came the decisions about long-term repairs.

"You can't buy wire-reinforced glass any more and the Australian standard for glasshouses like these is 6mm grade A toughened glass," Mr Creasy said. "But some of the houses are quite old, built in the 1960s, with 2mm glass panels. We were unsure whether the structure would be able to take a 200 per cent increase in weight, with the 6mm glass."

Inspecting the structure of the houses revealed rusted rivets (which were replaced by stainless steel bolts) and houses that were not properly anchored to the ground.

"We could see a lot of room for improvement and realised that this was the most opportune time to make these improvements as it would be much cheaper and, with the glass gone, far more convenient to do it now, while the storm repairs were under way," he said.

The insured repairs came to about $800,000. Additionally, the University, the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences and the School contributed, in total, about another $300,000 which was used to improve this facility and now the glasshouses are all robust, durable and working much more effectively.

The renaissance of the glasshouses took two years and two weeks.

There are new extraction fans, new versions of double glazing, using twin wall acrylic panels, the new thermal screens (some under the roofs and some over the roofs of the lower houses) and a computerised system that opens and closes vents and screen, according to weather conditions. All of these have resulted in a significant improvement to the operations, through improved environmental control systems.

"There is a real vibrancy and buzz around the glasshouses now. Students are running experiments they never would have been able to do before, with the improved facilities. We have a lot of overseas visitors and they are all most impressed and taking home some of our ideas."

So what was truly devastating for some people, shocking and difficult for others, has turned out to have enormous benefits for the students, the School and the University.

As Alan Luks, School Manager, put it: "We managed to turn our lemons into lemonade."

Published in UWA News , 14 May 2012