A lucky escape - for some

Cyclone Yasi hit the North Queensland coast early Thursday morning - it veered away from Cairns at the last minute and impacted on an area called Mission Beach, a fairly rural backwater that I spent a few happy days hanging out at when I was backpacking. There's not much left of it now. Boats were carried hundreds of feet inland and ended up embedded in houses, cars have just disappeared and townships have been gutted. Brisbane was well out of the firing line but over the night a lot of us stayed up watching what was going on on the TV. It was pretty horrific watching the storm approach and listening to the official advice - 'stay inside the smallest room in your home. If the roof rips off, remain in the room as it is safer than leaving.' At one point we heard about two people who had rung emergency services because they no longer felt safe in their home. It was too late, no-one was able to venture out into that so they just had to stick it out.

To give an idea of the size of this monster here's a satellite photo - the coast of N Queensland is in white on the left hand side

It's hard to get an idea of size from that if you don't know Australia, so here's the same storm superimposed over Europe

Amazingly despite the damage there has only been one recorded death, a poor soul who ran a diesel generater inside a building and choked on the carbon monoxide well after the worst of the storm was over. So in many ways Far North Queensland (or FNQ) dodged a bullet, but try telling that to the poor buggers at Mission Beach, Tulley & Innisfail who've lost everything.