It seems as if a miracle has occurred in Australia last night. At this stage we have no reported deaths. The Premier of Queensland Anna Bligh is not relaxing on that yet as there are communities who are at this stage unreachable, and we don't know their fate.
Searching 101 your daughter will be absolutely safe, though a little wet
The Gold Coast is approx 1700km (1056miles) south of the core point of impact, and that is over 20 hours driving!
Cyclone Yasi hit the towns of Mission Beach, Innisfail (which suffered another devastating cylcone in 2006), Cardwell, Tully and Silkwood with it's full intensity at around midnight Qld time (1am Eastern Standard Time) last night. The large cities of Townsville and Cairns were fortunately out of the eye of the cyclone, so the damage in these highly populated areas was far less.
The cyclone is continuing inland south-westerly direction at around 40km an hour, with winds reduced to approx 100km an hour. It has been reduced to a level 3 cyclone at this stage. By this evening it will have reached Mt Isa (a key mining town), and by that stage will have reduced to severe storm warning, as opposed to cyclone warning.
To give you an idea of the size of Australia V USA, and the enormous size of Cyclone Yasi, here are a couple of maps for you to compare:
Australia and USA
Australia and Europe
Searching 101 you can see Brisbane located half way up the east coast of the continent at the far right hand point. Heading north you see Rockhampton -
Townsville - Cairns - Cooktown. The full force was between Townsville and Cairns. As mentioned, Zahra Baker lived just inland of Townsville.
Cyclone Yasi is heading to Mt Isa, which on the map is not far from Alice Springs at the centre.
Yasi has hit the top quarter of Australia - imagine how many people this would have affected if it hit America or Europe? Fortunately our population is only about 23milion across the entire country!
The serious threat now is the flooding from hundreds of millimetres of rain. Qld was expecting rain of up to 50mm (2 inches) per hour. The rain continues now and even as far south as Melbourne (heading south from Brisbane you see Sydney - Canberra - Melbourne on the mainland) we are expecting rain for the next 4 days. AND Victoria the state of which Melbourne is the capital is still flooding from the rain a couple of weeks ago!
You could say the right 1/4 of Australia has been battered in the last few weeks by rain, flooding, and now a cyclones with further flooding. Victoria has now started to have bushfires in the limited areas that weren't flooded! There has also been a cyclone on the western seaboard near Perth this week.
The hardest hit are our primary producers. Farmers across the eastern coast, from top to bottom have been devastated by flooding in the last few weeks. Queensland is a huge banana and sugar producing state and the bananas have been completely wiped out (in peak season). Queensland's other greatest industry is tourism, and the Great Barrier Reef which we haven't heard about at this stage (hopefully it survived safely under water!).
I will upload photos once they start to make it out into the media.
