The night that time stood still up north

8th Feb 2011

Correspondents from The Australian were among first to report on the devastation from Cyclone Yasi on Thursday in a special noon edition of the newspaper. Here are some of their reports

THE wait for the gathering storm seemed to last forever. In shopping malls and hotels, in schools and pubs, people hunkered down, listening to the news and settling children as night started to fall..

Initially, forecasters had predicted the destructive core of Cyclone Yasi would arrive at 11pm AEST, centred on the town of Innisfail. But as the witching hour grew closer, the storm front slowed as it neared the coast.

The Bureau Of Meteorology calculated that by 7pm it was travelling at 29km/h, down from 35km/h, pushing the arrival time back to midnight. And Yasi was dipping slightly south too, moving in a west-southwest direction.

But there was little to see. The noise heralded its arrival. A wind that seemed to hum at first was soon howling. And it was the soundtrack of the cyclone that people will remember.

The roaring of the wind. The deafening rain. The screeching of roofs as they peeled away.

By 10pm, winds had topped 100 km/h in many areas. Innisfail Mayor Bill Shannon reported seeing the roof torn from a building near the council chambers where 500 people were sheltering. "It's like a freight train comin' through," another man quipped.

But as the clock ticked over to midnight, amid the fury, at least one sign of good fortune could be seen to sprout.

In slipping ever so slightly south, Yasi was sparing the major population centre of Cairns.

Instead, ground zero would be the low-lying resorts of Mission Beach, 50km south of Innisfail, and further south again at hamlets such as Tully and Cardwell.

Far from the glossy tourist brochures, Mission Beach would be left looking like a scene from Apocalypse Now.

But as the sun started to peek over the horizon, as early reports began to filter through, it emerged that great swaths of far north Queensland had avoided the doomsday predictions.

The damage was still obvious: banana plantations flattened, buildings denuded, cars upended, trees uprooted, shops damaged, and debris and glass scattered streets.

Three babies were born overnight, two at Innisfail hospital. At a Cairns evacuation centre at Redlynch State College, Akiko Pruss delivered her second child, a girl, soon after 6am after a three-hour labour. She was right on time. And she is not being named Yasi, her mother declared.

While the bureau calculated that the wind gust reached a staggering 290km/h during the night, in arriving later than expected, Yasi landed on a falling tide, meaning the storm surge was not quite as high as anticipated, reducing the extent of the flood damage.

The bureau had first downgraded Cyclone Yasi from a category 5 storm to category 4 at 3am. Two hours later, as the eye of the storm moved inland 130km west of Cardwell, it was downgraded again to category 3 but was moving more quickly again.

In her early morning briefing Queensland Premier Anna Bligh warned the country not to relax just yet. It was a salient point.

If there was a lesson from Cyclone Larry, it was that the full toll of the disaster can take not just hours but days to realise.

"We're going to need to get in the air to really get a picture of this," Bligh said.

At least 175,000 residents were known to be without power around the Innisfail region, and with live power lines down in many streets, the danger was still very real, she said.

But the encouragement was unmistakable all the same.

Here was a leader who refused to sugar-coat the horror of the January floods and has not baulked at the looming destruction of Yasi -- and she bore what amounted to the best news we could have hoped for. By 6am, emergency crews had already been on the streets of Cairns for up to two hours, and it appeared the city had been spared, she said.

"The early news is not anything like I expected from a category 5 cyclone," Bligh said. "But it's still far too early to talk about dodging bullets."

And it appears certain that around Mission Beach and Tully at least, the barrage from Yasi has found its mark. Early estimates are that at least 90 per cent of shops on the main street in Mission Beach suffered extensive damage. At the Elandra Resort -- where around 70 locals spent the night in a structure built to withstand cyclones -- general manager David Brook confirmed the worst.

Brook has lived through five cyclones in the past 20 years. Yasi was by far the worst, he said. Cars had been swept away, trees were down, many roofs torn off and the sand on the beach had all but disappeared, as if vacuumed out of existence.

"Nothing's been spared," he told ABC Radio. "The devastation is phenomenal, like nothing I've ever experienced."

Article Source : Drew Warne-Smith, AAP