Cyclone Yasi batters northeast Australia
Heavy rains, 185 mph winds devastate vegetation, homes
TULLY, Australia – The most powerful storm in a century ripped across Australia’s northeast coast early today, blasting apart houses, laying waste to banana crops and leaving boats lying in the streets of wind- and wave-swept towns.
Authorities said they were surprised to learn at daybreak that no one had been reported killed, but cautioned that bad news could eventually emerge from communities still cut off after the storm, which left several thousand people homeless.
Emergency services fanned out as to assess the damage across a disaster zone stretching more than 190 miles in Queensland state, using chain saws to cut through trees and other debris blocking roads.
Cyclone Yasi was moving inland and losing power today. But drenching rains were still falling, adding woes to a state where Australia’s worst flooding in decades has killed 35 people since late November.
Hundreds of thousands of people spent the night huddled in evacuation centers or bunkered in their homes as the cyclone hit, packing howling winds gusting to 185 mph and causing tidal surges that swamped coastal areas.
“Nothing’s been spared. The devastation is phenomenal, like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” David Brook, the manager of a resort at Mission Beach, where the core of the storm hit the coast around midnight, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
“Vegetation has been reduced to sticks,” said Sgt. Dan Gallagher, a Mission Beach police officer.
At Tully, about 12 miles inland along the storm’s path, the main street was littered with twisted pieces of metal that were once house roofs and jagged shards of glass from shattered shopfront windows. Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said one in three houses in the town of 3,500 people either were demolished by the storm or had the roof ripped off.
Tully and Mission Beach were among a handful of towns in a relatively narrow band that bore the brunt of Yasi’s fury as it stormed ashore.
The main coastal highway was a slalom course of downed trees and power lines, surrounded by scenes of devastation: roofs peeled back from houses, fields of sugar cane and banana shredded and flattened, once-green expanses stripped to brown soil.