by Cheryl Adam
Living in the tropics, we’ve done it all before. Satellite estimates greatly help to evaluate cyclonic activity nowadays although there is always the unknown – where will it hit the coast? How fast is it travelling? What is its trajectory?
Back in March 1911, a year before the Titanic sank, the Yongala, a 300-foot iron steamer, did not even have a radio onboard when 122 souls on board including a baby, a racehorse called Moonshine and a bull went to their watery graves south of Townsville. The vessel had steamed out of Mackay as the recently invented Marconi wireless had just been dispatched for the ship from England, but the radio was still in transit when the cyclone struck. The Captain never knew about the impending cyclone.
We had survived cyclones Yasi (2011) and Larry (2006). This one seemed destined further north. The chances of it hitting Airlie Beach and our beloved Providence V seemed unlikely. We drove to the retreat that was up a country road off the highway and parked the car for three days of peace and quiet. Our only visitor was a peacock that strutted across the verandah. Surprisingly, it settled rather ungracefully at our feet as though seeking comfort. The retreat was known for its bird life. Already then I sensed there was change in the air. Something in the hurried way the sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched across the skies.
Day two of the anniversary getaway and Grant is spending more time checking the Bureau of Meteorology than reading a novel. The cyclone has been upgraded. Winds of up to 100 km per hour have been recorded around Proserpine, which houses the local airport for the Whitsundays. The owner of the retreat, delivering a sumptuous breakfast, exudes calm.
“We should be right,” he says emphatically.
I want to believe him.
“I think you’re panicking unnecessarily,” I murmur. Grant’s furrowed brow signals my words will make no difference. He has brine in his veins, I’ve once told him, having made a living as a fisherman, a commercial diver, and, when we first met, he was diving for sea urchins along the chilly east Tasmanian coast in known spots for white pointers. (He has lived his life working around the weather.) I often tell our guests he is “the weather guru.” Almost 100% of the time, he is spot on with every forecast.
Outside the morning light has changed to metallic grey. Light rain begins to fall. The wind has picked up. We are used to the wet season in the surly tropics: thunderous one night, sizzling the next. For some years now, increasingly like many other changing global weather patterns confronting climate change, the traditional wet – the usual February downpour that would last the whole month – has not eventuated.
On the computer screen, the map of the swirling dervish they are calling Cyclone Debbie dominates. Its dance swallows up the screens on the laptop computer and the mobile phone, taunting any attempt at peace. Debbie is 500 kms north east of Townsville in the Coral Sea. By the time we do pack the car and leave a day early, the winds have heightened. The owner of the retreat has stopped all optimistic chitchat making no attempt to convince us to stay. As we drive towards Airlie Beach, the winds buffet the car. It is not until later that I hear a 31-year-old tourist died in a two-car crash, reportedly killed because of wild winds near Airlie Beach.
We have booked into a hotel near the marina. The prediction is that Debbie is heading for the regional township of Ayr, about two hours drive further north. 3500 residents had also been evacuated from the area between Home Hill and Proserpine, with a further 2000 told to leave the coastal town of Bowen as well. Retired people are included in the evacuees. Our hearts go out to them, knowing the panic they must feel. Palaszczuk is on television urging people to go to cyclone shelters. But the shelters in Airlie Beach are in the high schools and are only to be used as an absolute last resort.
Queensland Police Deputy Commissioner, Steve Gollschewski, asks North Queenslanders to listen to advice from emergency services.
“If you are in a storm surge zone and are directed to move, you must move,” he advises.
“You can shelter in your house from wind, but you can’t shelter from a storm surge.”
So many North Queensland homes are on the seafront. More than 100 schools have been closed across the North Queensland coast. Shop fronts in the small town centre of Ayr in North Queensland are being boarded up and filled with sandbags as locals make final preparations.
The media coverage has been focused on Townsville and Ayr. Then, the predictions change. Debbie is one of our slowest moving cyclones, moving at around six kilometres an hour. Global warming increases the intensity of cyclones. Although still a Category-3, Debbie’s winds at the centre are already 260 kms per hour – strong enough, according to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), to cause “structural damage and dangerous debris.” As we head back to Airlie Beach from the retreat, her trajectory is a curved line still heading for Townsville. Then, Debbie is supposed to be heading inland through the former gold rush town of Charters Towers.
The longer the cyclone stays over the warm waters of the Coral Sea, however, the greater the chance of intensification, is the latest pronouncement from the BOM which now plays like our favourite TV channel on all devices. South of the cyclone, however, is always where the most damage occurs and that means us. Daily rainfalls of up to 400 mm are being forecast.
By 3.15 pm on 27 March, Cyclone Debbie has been upgraded to Category-4. It has taken all of 12 hours to rocket from a Category-2 to Category-4.The dark red and paler pink circles on the computer screen, looking for all the world like a dart board, is aiming straight for us – the classic ‘eye’ of the cyclone is clearly visible. The ‘core’ of Cyclone Debbie is said to be 100 kms wide and is ‘very destructive’ according to the BOM. Premier Palaszczuk announces through the media: “The window of opportunity to leave is drastically closing.”
We abandon the rental home at Shute Harbour (a 15-minute drive from Airlie Beach) hurriedly packing only essentials; taking in furniture from the verandah; tying down what we can. With only a pull-along suitcase, laptops and phones we head for Shingley Beach hotel, a place where we last stayed on our journey north from Tasmania. We know the manager, the late Nigel Pemberton who sadly died during the writing of this book. He often booked guests on Providence V.
It is no longer the Shingley Beach hotel that we know. Panic has set in. The reception area is buzzing as the central hub. Pemberton, it transpired, has a barbecue with gas so when the electricity goes, we can still cook. We bunker down in the upstairs room. ‘Bertha’, our 11-seater van can’t quite fit into the cement car park. With some trepidation, we leave her in the street. Falling branches are the worst missiles. As I walk up to the hotel room, a tiny bush turkey scrabbles frantically in the dirt. I imagine what little resistance it will have to the oncoming winds. I think of the other wildlife bunkering down: the twittering rosellas, wallabies and the shorebirds – sooty and pied oystercatchers and the cockatoos who still seem to be clinging to the branches of the eucalypts. They are all silenced by the enormity of what is coming.
Our provisions only just fit into the bar fridge. My daughter, Phoebi calls. In professional mode as a Masters student in Psychology, she tells me she will update relatives, as we may have no phone connection. She confirms it’s looking increasingly likely we are in the line of fire and Debbie should make landfall around 8 am. At least it will be light then, I think. Back in the hotel room we huddle over the laptop looking at old downloaded movies I never seem to have time to watch. The disconnection with the outside world is yet to occur. Everything seems surreal. How will we know what is happening? It hadn’t occurred to us then how long it will be before we can reconnect with civilisation. That evening, around 10 pm, the television stops working abruptly. We didn’t think about a radio … such an anachronistic item in this digital age. Plunged into darkness as there are now no lights, Phoebi calls again, her voice strangely symbolic in the darkness. The mobile phone, at least still has battery.
“Mum, are you ok? It’s not going to be over soon. They say it might be a couple of days.”
They are
the last words I hear before falling asleep. Her voice enters my dreams. When I awake in the early hours, the eerie sound of the wind is low and howling – a relentless sound that will plague us for days. As we look out of the window on to the small balcony, there is no way to open the sliding door. White starred lilies in the flowerboxes have somehow survived. The water lashes down. The balcony floor is slowly filling to become a pond. In the distance, yacht masts bob desolately like ghosts in the grey mist that cloaks the marina. There are no birds anywhere. No one is out there. It is as though the world has come to an end. I watch the poles holding the marina walkways. The water is still far below. At least the high tide didn’t coincide with the arrival of Cyclone Debbie. Debbie had been forecast to arrive to coincide with high tides, with predictions of a 7-metre (23-foot) surge. But this hadn’t happened.
When Yasi struck in 2011, the marina at Port Hinchinbrook broke free leaving boats beached along the main road through the small coastal town of Cardwell or lying on the bottom of the harbour. The damage was around $30 million. It was widely reported that the pylons holding the marina walkways had been cut too short by the developer – Gold Coast entrepreneur and developer of Sea World, the late Keith Williams, when it was built in the 1990s.
Paddling down the hotel walkway, wind gusts up the road in front of the hotel whipping the tops of the palm trees that line the beach. For hours the scene remains the same. There is no link to anyone or anything. No radio; no TV; no internet – nothing. It’s as though we’ve fallen into another world, the world of nightmares. Hades has our pass and he is not letting us return. Downstairs Pemberton has fired up the barbecue. People are bringing supplies to cook. Pemberton is like a scoutmaster directing his charges.
Then relief. Around mid-morning, the moaning stops. It is replaced by a strange quiet. Still no one has appeared outside. It is the eye of the cyclone: the centre of the storm that can be anywhere from 30–65 kms wide surrounded by a ring of towering thunderstorms. The eye can be the most hazardous, especially at sea when wind-driven waves all travel in the same direction around the eye wall, but at the centre of the eye they converge from all directions and slowly build until they become rogue waves up to 40 metres high. No wonder the 300-foot steel and iron Yongala sank even with a greatly experienced Captain at the helm.
Outside, it is even eerier than before. Everything is still … waiting … we feel like victims after an assault … lying there wounded but knowing the worst is yet to come. Victims of cyclones are often lulled into a sense of calm by the eye. Venturing out to inspect the damage, they get caught on the eyewall on the other side of the cyclone with violent winds. Grant has been talking about going out to our berth to check on Providence V. I try to dissuade him, but he is adamant. Before we discuss it further, he begins to jog towards the marina. A couple of other shadowy figures join him on the same mission, dark shapes just visible in the thick grey mist scurrying along the wharf. When he returns about 15 minutes later, he looks crushed, as though he can’t comprehend what has happened. It is an unfamiliar expression for me. He usually copes well in the worst situations.
“Two boats broke lose. One’s a big white boat. It’s been pounding into her … gouging out her wood … the marina is barely holding together.”
Behind the reception desk is a large radio – our only contact to the world. We have a mobile telephone provider that has no signal. Pemberton has a different one that works. I call Phoebi.
“Where’s it crossing the coast? Does anyone know?”
“It’s right above you … now.”
Even though I know this is the case, this confirmation from the outside world is shattering. I find out later that Cyclone Debbie actually crossed the coast at 2.40 am.
“What’s happened to Providence? Do you know?” Phoebi asks.
Our beautiful boat, part of our family for almost as long as we have all been together. I begin to cry. I had been hoping she wasn’t going to ask.
I finish through tears: “There is nothing we can do … for the moment.”
The wind, when it returns much later, has shifted although I don’t notice.
Grant sniffs the air. “Changed to the north from the south-east,” he announces. It is the kind of pronouncement I know I should heed. Quietly uttered but full of meaning. My first introduction to the mystery of boats was reading The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx where each chapter opened with an epigraph taken from Ashley’s Book of Knots. I have almost mastered a bowline but it’s taken a while. When we first met in Tasmania, I was reminded of this Newfoundland romance.
“And?”
“Those boats will now be crashing into someone else …”
His face shows relief even though it seems wrong to be wishing misfortune on others.
The frustration he feels in not being able to protect our beloved Providence when he’s spent 14 years caring for her must be unbearable. There is nothing much to say.
The evening is more of the same relenting greyness that gradually succumbs to black. All afternoon the rain has been driving in sheets up the street in front of us. Branches snap periodically but the trees hold. The shadecloth in front of the hotel is rent asunder. We can just make out the mast of Providence V and her Jolly Roger flag among the other spikes of masts sticking up into the gloom. There is no opportunity to check on her further.
Debbie’s destructive slow-moving crossing is to pummel the region for 16 hours with 250 km per hour winds. But it is the ensuing relentless downpour straight after the destructive winds that rips apart buildings and proves the most damaging, rendering many homes and hotels unable to be rebuilt due to water damage.
The following morning Grant returns to our rental property in Shute Harbour from Airlie Beach. I follow in Bertha (who miraculously has survived). The promontory that we share with a few other houses faces south-east and directly on to the Coral Sea into the path of Cyclone Debbie as she crossed the coast. Shute Harbour, where the ferries once departed for Hamilton Island, fared worse than anywhere else in the Whitsundays.
Outside, the world looks like a set from the ABC’s television series, Cleverman. Or, at the least, the aftermath of an apocalyptic event. Large trees lie across the road. Power poles are uprooted. Live wires lie exposed. By far the biggest impact, though, is the desolating silence and the inability to communicate with anyone. How much we depend on instant communication.
A stillness has replaced the howling wind. I feel a deep sense of abandonment. Everywhere is deserted as though the place had been evacuated. Even the birds have fled. Surely someone will scream in the streets at the horror of it all. But there is no one – the same dull grey skies as yesterday. It’s as though the sun has never shone. Empty roads. No cars.
A trip to the local supermarket and I discover where everyone is. They are here in this darkened shop with no lights, waiting for up to an hour for provisions. Everything is added up using pen and paper. There is not enough power for the cash registers. No one wants to risk using their phone battery, which can’t be charged if the electricity fails. I wait with two bags of ice. Twenty minutes later, in the steamy heat, they have almost melted. There are still 20 people in front of me. I put them back in the freezer. There are at least 100 people queuing speechlessly cowed by the enormity of the events of the last 24 hours unified by one desire: to survive. Most of them are from a generation that has never had to endure the horrors of abstinence. The tales from our parents and their parents who survived world wars are stories. We are not good at this. Being deprived.
After leaving the supermarket and, 15 minutes later, approaching Shute Harbour, mounds of leaves lie across the road and more fallen branches. The trees, stripped bare of their leaves, stand naked and vulnerable. Houses appear in the bush where I’d never known houses to be before, the occupants’ lives bared for everyone to see.
Considering the majority of houses in Shute Harbour have sustained major damage, our rental property has fared okay. ‘Structurally speaking,’ it has su
rvived. ‘Cyclone speak’ phrases that we learn to roll out in those early days and weeks – a short form appraisal of events while everyone is too preoccupied to need to know more.
This is how people communicate post-cyclone. There are survivors and those who struggle. In the ensuing weeks, and, for at least a year later, marriages collapse; buildings fall down or are abandoned; businesses fold. People pack up everything they own and leave town. Mercifully, compared to Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when 71 people were killed, there was reportedly only one fatality in the Whitsundays – the tourist in the car accident. As Debbie travelled south, however, mass flooding claimed 14 lives including a mother and her two children who drowned when their car plunged into a river.
The snail-paced recovery in Airlie Beach mirrors the sluggishness of the cyclone. A year later ‘tradies’ such as plumbers and carpenters still occupy a large share of the rental properties as they are also working on the badly damaged Hamilton Island. Shattered houses are still not back in the rental pool. Damage to the sugar industry was said to be $150 million. Around 60,000 homes were without power in the Bowen, Mackay and the Whitsunday regions. Electricity took far longer than anyone realised to be reconnected in Airlie Beach.
Our house in Shute Harbour is on the edge of the promontory looking straight out to sea. The views are the kind that evokes a sharp intake of breath from visitors. My parents had visited. We’d had a family reunion of the kids at Christmas all the while thinking this must be a dream. One winter, we had seen a cavorting humpback calf with its mother from the verandah. We kept our kayak down at the beach and would go for picnics to the islands half an hour’s paddle away. But we can’t really live here anymore. The dream vanished after the cyclone.
We had to leave our cars at the top of a driveway that was choked with fallen branches and leaves. The swimming pool is like an ominous dark lake. A fallen tree lurked at the bottom of it. Outdoor fences were wrenched off, lurching over my vegetable garden. Louvre windows were smashed. The south-easterlies with lashing rain had forced the sliding doors open. Water had seeped through into the wooden floorboard of the lounge room drenching the curtains in the bedroom, as well as the bed and furniture. A heavy glass outdoor table had been hurled upside down off the top verandah and shattered. Glass had fallen into the pool. Worse, the glass partitions in the verandah of the neighbour’s house, which had just been sold for more than $1million, had also blown into our pool.