I'm ready...give me some Foster's!!
Posted on 03/20/2006 4:35:25 PM PST by blam
Australia bears onslaught of huge cyclone
11:22 20 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Emma Young, Sydney
A devastating tropical cyclone has ripped through north-eastern Australia, injuring people and destroying homes with gusts of up to 290 kilometres (180 miles) per hour. And another cyclone – the Southern hemisphere's hurricane equivalent – is on its way.
The first cyclone, named Larry, reached maximum (Category 5) intensity at about the time of landfall. It hit the coast at the town of Innisfail, about 100 kilometres (62 miles) south of Cairns, at 0700 Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on Monday. Larry is now weakening as it moves west over land and leaves its power source – evaporating ocean water – behind. By 2000 AEST it was about 400 km inland and had downgraded to a Category 2 storm.
It is not yet clear how many people have been injured but no serious injuries have been reported. Along the coast, residents have described houses blown away and trees uprooted. About half the houses in Innisfail have been damaged, according to emergency services. Millions of dollars worth of sugar cane and banana crops have also been destroyed.
A tent city will now be erected to house the homeless, and power workers will try to restore electricity to 50,000 homes in the north of the state. Innisfail resident Bruce Crozer spoke to ABC Radio as the cyclone approached: “It’s a shocker. It’s blowing a million miles an hour. I’m three kilometres west of town and I can’t see much at all. The rain is coming horizontal and it’s horrendous.”
Hurricane Katrina
Hundreds of people were evacuated from low-lying regions before the storm hit, and mandatory evacuations took place in Cairns on Monday. Schools in the area were closed.
Another cyclone, called Wati, is currently about 2000 km (1250 miles) east of Queensland. This cyclone is intensifying, and the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) expects it to hit Australia in a few days.
Larry’s maximum wind speeds were similar to those of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in August 2005. But communities affected by Larry were not below sea level, so they were not at the same risk of devastating flooding.
It will take a few days to fully assess the property damage caused by Larry, but it could turn out to be the most destructive cyclone ever to hit Queensland, says the BoM’s Cyclone Warning Centre in Brisbane. Five Category 5 cyclones have been recorded in the past.
Recent research suggests that severe tropical cyclones, also called "super-cyclones", hit Australia's Great Barrier Reef coast every 200 to 300 years - 10 times more often than was previously thought (see 'Super-cyclone' threat to Great Barrier Reef raised).
Just heard on Fox News that forecasters expect more of this years hurricanes to hit the east coast.
From what I heard on the news, there were no deaths, thank God. Our Aussie friends are apparently more organized and better prepared than Chocolate City Nagin.
...I wonder if they have "It's Bush's fault" billboards down under?
???
First "Larry" then "Wati"...
What kind of naming system are the Aussies following anyway?
It sure doesn't look like they're doing it in aphabetical order.
Alphabetical order is not ordained for all the world to follow.
Well that's what is wrong with the rest of the world, then. ;)
Here in the Florida panhandle, the Seaside community decided to leave their beaches alone and settle inland some distance in the lee of the dunes. In fact they have strict ordinances about leaving the dunes intact.
Hurricanes Elana and Kate in '85, Erin and Opal in '95 and a few near misses since have had almost no effect on them, while they had drastic effects on the rest of the area on both sides of them.
Meanwhile, in areas where you can't find the beach because it's hidden behind the condos, losses were huge.
doesn't the alphabet go the other way south of the Equator? :)
Actually, Wati is a storm that formed in another basin that seeped over to Australia's Eastern basin, hence the non-alphabetic order. Sort of like if Hurricane Willia from the Pacific basin seeped into the Atlantic basin while there was a Hurricane Leslie in the Atlantic basin and struck Florida. Storms since 1996 keep the alphabetical order of the basins they formed in, not the basins where they strike.
The JTWC forecast track has Wati turning away from Australia, FWIW.
I'm ready...give me some Foster's!!
FNC is getting their info from AccuWeather and Joe "It's Gonna Make Landfall Somewhere" Bastardi. I'll hold out until the NHC says it is so.
,,, the hurricanes are a problem but things like coastal taipans would concern me if I was cleaning up.
I can't remember in my living memory if there has ever been any cyclones in New Zealand - not in Auckland. Although from one old testbook there was one in the mid 1970s.
Compared with my native Hong Kong where you get 3-4 typhoons every year. If you get a direct/semi-direct one, you get a Typhoon Signal No. 8 or higher from the Hong Kong Observatory. As a school boy I always "looked" forward to theswe occasions as it means schools are off and "Yay! No school! We have an extra holiday!". The winds of 130+ km per hr in a metropolis with highrise buildings are far more lethal than average gusty storms here in New Zealand - often a few people will get killed in typhoons with Signal No. 10 (the highest signal).
I was in Hong Kong once for a "Black Rain" event. One of the most intense downpours I have ever seen
They seem to have a lot more these since I came to NZ in the early 1990s. The only occasion of massive downpour I experienced was not long after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989: a rain started at mid morning: I was still at primary school (elementary school) and schools were normally out at 12:35 pm. The rain was so bad the roads got flooded and no school bus could come. We stayed on until 2 pm as the school bus came. When I got home - it was an apartment building, the ground floor had been flooded and the water was as deep as knee level!
The roughest storm I've been thru in NZ was the Wahine one, on April 10 1968. That was a cyclone. There have been a couple since that would have been close enough to the strength of the Wahine one though.
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