North Qld in path of Cyclone Yasi

Just briefly...Anna Bligh said at her afternoon press conference today that it's time to bunker down, no more evacs the places are full and the weather, too woolly.  Cyclone Yasi's wind speed as it flattened Willis Island, just off the coast, was 295km per hour - just to put it in perspective Hurricane Katrina's top wind speed was 225km per hour - those in the affected areas will most likely have found somewhere reasonably safe to be, but there would still be a high risk to those on the outlying areas of the towns in the path of Yasi.

During the January floods "social media" became a corner stone for referral information for relief efforts, and Queenslanders are utilizing the same means in anticipation of this huge cyclone. If you need info or resources/support referral there are several sites including facebook offering contacts. The electricity and other resources will probably only be available for a short period, so there may be difficulties keeping in communication for people who have holed up in their homes, rather than evacuation centres.




One can only speculate the potential impact of this cyclone after the recent storm activity.


Here's an excerpt from an earlier press conference today with the Qld premier,

"By way of comparison the last category five cyclone to cross the coast of Queensland was in 1918. So this is an event we have no recent experience of. This also means that we will see very, very high seas and the Bureau has also issued a warning for dangerous swells all the way down to the Sunshine Coast. 

 The Bureau has issued a warning and they are only going to get more dangerous in the next 24 hours all the way down the coast to the Sunshine Coast.
The other important message this morning is to say to those communities to the west of the area between Cairns and Townsville that they need to be equally prepared.

The cyclone is looking like it will be around Georgetown as a category 3 cyclone around 9am tomorrow morning. So as this cyclone moves across the coast it will slow down a little but it will still be a very serious cyclone, category 3, in towns like Georgetown which normally you would never see a cyclone in. So the Tablelands, the Hinterland and then towns to the west need to start preparing and understanding that this event will affect them and give cyclonic conditions.

We now have approximately nine and a half thousand people in 20 evacuation centres between Cairns and Townsville. Most of them in Cairns or Townsville but another large one in Innisfail.

There is still some spare capacity in some of these centres and I said this morning the window was still open and closing. It is still a little crack of light there and there is still some last minute opportunities, people who are in any of those areas that might experience flooding should be looking at their absolutely last chance. The next time I am doing an update there will be no further opportunities for people to move. Those people who are not in an inundation area please do not go to the evacuation centres. You are safer in your own home and you will only take up space from people who cannot be in their own homes or the home of a friend. So please, only go the evacuation centres if you are firstly in a flood or inundation area and you are not able to find accommodation with a friend or a family member.

Look I think it's very hard to even contemplate the unbearable circumstances that many families are going to be facing tonight. We need to understand that they will be in very frightening circumstances. They will be for the most part going through cyclonic winds of up to 300km an hour, torrential rain and many of them will do that without any electricity, without any mobile telecommunications and some of them may well be doing it with parts of their roof coming off. As the Deputy Commissioner said this morning people who are bunkered in their house are safer in their house even if parts or all of the roof come off. I know it will be raining on them but going out into those winds even if it seems sensible is just the most dangerous thing to do.

So people do need to prepare themselves and particularly their children for something that will be quite frightening. But everything that can be done is being done and the safest place right now given it is not possible for most people now to leave town, the safest place is to be in their homes in the smallest room in the house. Whether that is your toilet, your bathroom, a laundry; the smallest room in your house will be the most structurally sound and that is where you should take your family when these winds really escalate."

(In response) "We're not evacuating people off Palm Island. The Palm Island Council has worked to ensure that anyone in a low lying area has been relocated to a house in a higher area. Palm Island is a council that is ready for this event. It will be one of the islands that experiences some very early symptoms of the cyclone because it's just that bit offshore. Without doubt because it's now south of where the cyclone is going to hit, it's those areas to the south that will feel the brunt of some of the stronger winds and particularly the storm surge so all the planning that can be done on Palm Island for that storm surge has been done. I'm very confident the council has done a good job in alerting people. It is a very small community and that does mean that you can just about talk to everybody."

JOURNALIST: Is the ETA still ten o'clock tonight?



PREMIER: At this stage yes and we'll update you through the day.

JOURNALIST: What happened to the cyclone bunkers promised after Cyclone Larry?

PREMIER: What was committed to after Cyclone Larry was that as we built large public infrastructure that lent itself to being capable of taking a large number of people that would be done at a category five cyclone level. That has happened. In Innisfail State High School the centre that is accommodating 500 people right now is a category 5 shelter and that was as a result of that rebuild. Redlynch State School which is also accommodating I think close to 1,000 people, built and finished at the end of last year, is a category 5 shelter and is accommodating a thousand people. The hall at the Babinda RSL is a category 5 shelter. So that's three that have been done in five years. The commitment was as we build the things that are necessary like school halls, where people could take shelter, we will build them to a category 5 level. But you can't accommodate 75,000 people in these sorts of shelters. That could never happen. You always need to expect that some people will be sheltering in their own homes."