Cyclone Yasi - Gone in a flash(-flood)

Cyclone Yasi has gone but not before dumping oceans of rain over the southern side Australia, causing flooding in towns across the state of Victoria including Melbourne. Many homes, businesses and cars were flooded but fortunately not on a scale of what we experienced in Queensland.

 Flooding from McIvor Creek in Heathcote, Victoria. Picture: Darren Crees. Source: Herald Sun

At our apartment building, the lift was finally fixed on Friday so I was able to move the remaining appliances down to our new apartment and we could move in and unpack on the weekend.

The building managers are now getting quotes for redoing all the interior that was damaged by the river flooding. All the drywalls and doors on the first and second levels need to be replaced.

The foyer of our apartment building. Note the water level marks on the windows a metre high on the second level.

One of the good things that came out of this was that I was got tickets to see Sting's "Symphonicities" concert as thanks for the work I did at Volunteering Queensland. It was held at the River Stage last night - An open air venue in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. The concert features Sting singing/playing with Australian-born singer Jo Lawry and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (or a symphony orchestra of the country he's in). The weather was perfect and the concert was fantastic. If this show is coming to your city it's really worth going to see.

Cyclone Yasi - Deaths: 0. Births: 3

Well the strongest part of Cyclone Yasi has come and gone, though it is still due to hit Mt Isa (which is not is not a "Cyclone hardened" town) as a force 1 cyclone around about now. And so far there are no reports of deaths or injury, but 3 children were born during the storm - One of them in an evacuation centre.

There was a lot of property damage in the centre of the area it hit with hundreds of homes destroyed or very badly damaged, roofs ripped off, boats piled on top of each other, cars crushed by fallen trees, and tree trunks, branches and foliage everywhere. Fortunately the speed at which the cyclone was moving reduced a bit just before it hit which meant that arrived a bit after high tide, and because of that the storm surge wasn't as high as initially predicted. It also seemed to help that the buildings that were built in the past few years to new specifications (and those that survived Cyclone Larry in 2006) withstood the battering well, and the big towns of Cairns and Townsville survived pretty well.

Over 170,000 homes lost power but the main electricity transmission line held up.

 Hinchinbrook Marina in Cardwell
Photo: Sydney Morning Herald

Here is a selection of photos showing the results of the cyclone.

Imagine winds of 300km/h

Cyclone Yasi has developed into a category 5 cyclone - The highest category. This means that it will have gusts of around 300km/h or more. See here for more on cyclone categories.

Yasi is now beginning to hit the mainland with its centre just south of the town of Innisfail. Innisfail is 1,300km NW of Brisbane and is one of the places we visited last September. The strongest winds occur in the "eyewall" of the cyclone (the part that surrounds the calm eye) but the cyclone will cause storm winds up to 400km each side and will take about 12 hours to pass.We're not directly affected in Brisbane but it's really going to stretch the volunteers and emergency services who are still busy with the flood cleanup. After the cyclone has hit the coast it will weaken as it moves inland, but will still be a category 3 cyclone when it reaches the mining town of Mt Isa, 800km inland of Innisfail. This cyclone really is big. See its size here compared to other continents around the world.

Surprisingly it is not the winds that are the most dangerous element: More deaths occur because the wind pushes up a storm surge of water and the predictions are that this will be 7m above normal high tide at cyclone's centre. A storm surge doesn't rise slowly like the Brisbane river floods did but comes in in powerful waves. Many of the towns along the coast are barely above sea level so there are a lot of homes and businesses that going to be flooded. Tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate, though a few people have chosen to stay. As of now (9:30pm) no emergency services will operate or try to rescue anyone until the cyclone has passed as it is too dangerous to go out.

Cyclone Yasi on 2011-02-02 at 19h32 AEST (Queensland time), about to hit the coast

Once again the Queensland government's communication and management has been fantastic. The premier, Anna Bligh, and the police chief give TV news conferences every hour to give the latest information of what's happening, what people must do, and what is expected to happen over the next few days. The Queensland Police service also sends out messages of advice and informatinon on Twitter and Facebook every few minutes. One of the things Anna Bligh warned of is that the main electricity transmission line serving the whole of north Queensland is going to be hit by the cyclone and that may bring down one or more pylons. If it does then the whole of northern Queensland will be without power for some time.

In local news...
With the power on in our apartment building and the lights working at last I was able to move almost everything from our old apartment to the new apartment with the help of a man-with-a-van (though I didn't need his van). It's just the big appliances and couch that will need to wait until the lift is working. Just to add to the current challenges, someone reversed into our car yesterday so that now needs to go into the panel shop.

Lots more news sure to come.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

The good news is that our apartment building had power switched on yesterday. We're hoping that the lift and fire protection services will be repaired today. Now that the lights are on we will be able to see how much cleaning is still left to do. It will be a lot. I'm still discovering storerooms in the building I didn't even know existed that were flooded.

The bad news is that Cyclone Yasi is coming to Queensland. It's big. REALLY BIG!
In 2006 Cyclone Larry hit towns in northern Queensland in the area around Townsville to Cairns, and did hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Yasi is expected to be as strong as Larry but is much, much bigger - 500km across and making a spiral of clouds with a diameter of 2,000km. It will hit the coast tomorrow and it is expected it will have winds in excess of 250km/h, and some models predicting gusts up to 315km/h.

 Satellite view 1 February 2011

All the resorts in the Whitsundays (a long chain of beautiful, tropical, white-sand holiday islands along the coast) have been evacuated. There is some information on Yasi here.

I'll probably be writing more about this...

A Pictorial Post

I mentioned that we took a break last Sunday. We went for a walk along the road next to the river (the riverside walkway immediately next to the river was still closed) and through one of our favourite areas, Rosalie, which has quaint, traditional wooden "Queenslander" houses many and lovely, small restaurants and shops in a little village centre. Rosalie is about 1km from the river but is low lying so the water came flooding in there. Low-lying areas like this were flooded even if the water didn't find a path on the surface, as it also came bubbling up from storm-water drains when the river reached a level higher than the drains.

Here are some of the photos I took along the way. Click on any photo to view it in a bigger size. All the photos in used in this blog and more of the floods are in an online album here, where you can see on a map where each photo was taken or view a slideshow of the whole lot..

The remains of the Regatta ferry terminal. The poles sticking up on the left are where the boarding platform used to be, with a jetty linking it to the waiting area on the right. All the other ferry terminals are in a similar state so it will be months (years?) before they are all operating again

A piece of a jetty from one of the ferry terminals

The badly damaged Drift Restaurant after being raised from the riverbed. This had to be intentionally sunk during the flood when it looked like it might break free from its moorings and damage bridges downstream.

The appreciation shown by the owners of shops at Rosalie. Note the high-water mark on the blackboard on the bottom photo.

Still Homeless

We took the day off on Sunday. It felt like we were on holiday!

On Monday I did some more cleanup at our apartment building. Getting the pool back in shape has been on the back-burner but I saw that it needed a quick fix to prevent it becoming a nursery for mosquitoes and other nasties. I picked up a big tub of chlorine from the pool shop and threw a bunch of that in. It definitely did something as within a few minutes several fish popped up to the surface gasping for air.

 

Before the flood

After

It's going to take a lot of work to clean it, as it's a vinyl-lined pool which means that it would be damaged if all the water was pumped out - The water that's in has to be cleaned.

The rest of the week I'm doing more IT work at Volunteering Queensland, but yesterday was Australia Day. We didn't do the traditional beach 'n barbie though - Christine went to work and I helped a flooded friend throw out flood-damaged cupboards at his house in the morning and spent the rest of the day packing boxes at our apartment so that we can move as soon as the building is liveable again. Speaking of that, the power might be restored tomorrow, and then it will just be a few more days to get the lift and fire services fixed up before we can move in. There's still mud in the garages so Sunday is a mud-working day again.

60,000 Volunteers Can't be Wrong

It's been a busy few days:

On Thursday I went to help out at Manny & Meg's Art Shed in West End. They carry a huge amount of stock normally, and when the floods came they only had time to rescue selected goods. They had to turf a huge pile of art supplies, and are trying to save another massive amount that was flood damaged which they will sell cheap or donate. I spent the morning cleaning tubes of paint, paintbrushes and other drawing materials together with other volunteers, including an ex-South African who had flown down from Cairns to help & a Bosnian sculptor who lives in Brisbane. Art supplies can cost a lot - I rescued a couple of thousand dollars worth in the time I was there.

 The inside of the Art Shed

One of the many bags of soiled stock

 Volunteers washing art supplies

Organising the stock that was saved from the floods

In the afternoon I went to help out at Volunteering Queensland - The organisation that puts volunteers together with the councils, emergency services, non-profits and charities that need them. Initially I was going to work on taking calls from volunteers or entering information into a database, but I quickly realised that most of the volunteers and permanent staff there are more "socially minded" than technology minded so I could help a lot more sorting out the data that had already been collected of 60,000+ volunteers. They realised that too and I quickly got given more tasks to do so went back on Friday (yesterday) and today. One of the things they were getting other volunteers to do is to copy registration information from emails from another 8,000 volunteers into their database one-by-one. I found a way to do it in one go it caused a bit of consternation today when they realised that I had just put ten volunteers out of work until they could find something else they needed them to do.

Our apartment repairs are going well but still needs work. Our lease ended today officially and we were supposed to move to the apartment downstairs, but everyone involved has agreed that it can wait until the building is habitable again. We have also convinced the owner to waive rent from when we had to evacuate and we will donate the rent money to the Flood Relief Fund instead - Actually on behalf of Charl & Joanna seeing as we're staying with them. Hopefully we will be able to move back to our apartment around the end of January.

It's been hard work the past couple of weeks. I'm going to take the day off tomorrow!