Yasi a week after
Well... it took a while before a headcount was done and the damage assessed. First up: the girl in the hostel I wrote about last blog had been evacuated to Cairns shopping centre with 2400 other people and her hostel is still there. The friend in Mission Beach insisted to stay at home so she was on her own in her cupboard for more than 12 hrs in the dark. The eye of the storm went straight over her village. She is still around and her house is too! As there are no weather gauges where the cyclone made landfall it will never be known what the exact force of the wind was. Most estimates were 225-280 km/hr winds right near the eye of the storm. On the Beaufort scale force 12 is more than 118 km/hr. Imagine twice that force!
As of a week after Yasi it is miraculous there have been no deaths. Well there was one actually, a 23 year old man that had a generator on in a closed room. He died of CO-poisoning. Besides Mission Beach, the towns of Tully and Cardwell were the worst hit it seems. 150 houses were completely destroyed, where another 500 were severely damaged. Whole banana plantations got wiped out.
The scary thing was that for a period of twelve hours the storm was so fierce that everyone had to fend for themselves. Rescue-sevices could not come out. No medical service. No help. No water, no electricity. Hardly any mobile phone service. At night.
For the next few days people could not safely go out because of intense rain, power lines over the road, whole trees uprooted. debris everywhere. And when finally the damage could be inspected, there was still no electricity, water or mobile reception. Apparently there is an intersection 20 kms from Cardwell in the middle of nowhere where there was a mobile signal, so heaps of cars were parked there with people in it on their phones.
I was glued to the radio around the time the eye was passing the North Queensland coast (Thursday 3 February 00.05 local time) Local ABC radio was live on the phone with people in the affected area. A man under a table in the dark, talking about the roar of the storm. A lady worried about her horses, on which she had painted her phone number, just in case they would bolt. Someone who had been in 7 cyclones was on the phone, had just woken up from a nap, about to make himself a cuppa tea. Yes, windows were bending to the force, sound of ripping corrugated iron, house was shaking. They all talked about the noise. As if a freight train or a big plane was about to come straight through their house.
When the eye passed the coast, the ABC talked to a man who was actually in the eye. Yes, eerily quiet, after the fiercest winds suddenly stopped... Could he see stars they asked him. He said, I didn't think of that, let me have a look. YES, he said. There are stars. The eye lasted about half an hour, to three quarters. Then another 8 hours of strong winds and heavy rain... and at high tides, some large storm surges, meaning extra large waves coming in dumping sand and salt water in large amounts, breaking up roads and converting bitumen streets into sandy tracks.
Yasi remained cyclone-force well and truly inland and reduced to a Tropical Low as it travelled past Mount Isa, down towards Alice Springs, went underneath there to the South-West and is still causing heavy rains in Western Australia as we speak.
Amazing. I hear that about half of the people that thought they were insured actually aren't. Guess why. Yes. The FINE print. Well that was to be expected but still a bit rough.
As of a week after Yasi it is miraculous there have been no deaths. Well there was one actually, a 23 year old man that had a generator on in a closed room. He died of CO-poisoning. Besides Mission Beach, the towns of Tully and Cardwell were the worst hit it seems. 150 houses were completely destroyed, where another 500 were severely damaged. Whole banana plantations got wiped out.
The scary thing was that for a period of twelve hours the storm was so fierce that everyone had to fend for themselves. Rescue-sevices could not come out. No medical service. No help. No water, no electricity. Hardly any mobile phone service. At night.
For the next few days people could not safely go out because of intense rain, power lines over the road, whole trees uprooted. debris everywhere. And when finally the damage could be inspected, there was still no electricity, water or mobile reception. Apparently there is an intersection 20 kms from Cardwell in the middle of nowhere where there was a mobile signal, so heaps of cars were parked there with people in it on their phones.
I was glued to the radio around the time the eye was passing the North Queensland coast (Thursday 3 February 00.05 local time) Local ABC radio was live on the phone with people in the affected area. A man under a table in the dark, talking about the roar of the storm. A lady worried about her horses, on which she had painted her phone number, just in case they would bolt. Someone who had been in 7 cyclones was on the phone, had just woken up from a nap, about to make himself a cuppa tea. Yes, windows were bending to the force, sound of ripping corrugated iron, house was shaking. They all talked about the noise. As if a freight train or a big plane was about to come straight through their house.
When the eye passed the coast, the ABC talked to a man who was actually in the eye. Yes, eerily quiet, after the fiercest winds suddenly stopped... Could he see stars they asked him. He said, I didn't think of that, let me have a look. YES, he said. There are stars. The eye lasted about half an hour, to three quarters. Then another 8 hours of strong winds and heavy rain... and at high tides, some large storm surges, meaning extra large waves coming in dumping sand and salt water in large amounts, breaking up roads and converting bitumen streets into sandy tracks.
Yasi remained cyclone-force well and truly inland and reduced to a Tropical Low as it travelled past Mount Isa, down towards Alice Springs, went underneath there to the South-West and is still causing heavy rains in Western Australia as we speak.
Amazing. I hear that about half of the people that thought they were insured actually aren't. Guess why. Yes. The FINE print. Well that was to be expected but still a bit rough.
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