Cyclone batters idyllic tourist area in Australia’s tropical northeast
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A powerful cyclone packing winds of up to 260 kilometers per hour roared across Australia’s tropical northeast yesterday, uprooting trees, tearing down fences and knocking out power to thousands, officials said.
Cyclone Debbie, which slammed into the coast of Queensland state as a fierce Category 4 storm, quickly began to weaken after making landfall near the resort town of Airlie Beach, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said.
By last night, it had been downgraded to a Category 2 storm, with wind gusting up to 155 kilometers per hour.
One man was injured after a wall collapsed in Proserpine, a town south of Airlie Beach, Queensland Police Commissioner Ian Stewart said. The man was taken to a hospital, where he was in stable condition.
The extent of the damage from the storm was not known as night fell across the region, but there were reports of roofs peeling from homes, fences crumbling and trees snapping in half.
The idyllic Whitsunday Islands, a popular tourist destination, were hit particularly hard, with one recorded wind gust of 263kph, the meteorology bureau reported.
The slow-moving storm pounded the coastal region for hours, creating what Stewart called a “battering ram effect,” with the same areas enduring the howling winds and drenching rains for a long time.
Communities along more than 300 kilometers of coastline were expected to be impacted, Stewart said.
Australia’s military sent vehicles, aircraft and supplies to the region, with soldiers focusing on clearing debris and reopening roads.
John Collins, a member of the Whitsundays government council, was sheltering from the storm with his wife and four daughters inside their house in Proserpine. He could see that four of his neighbors’ sheds had been destroyed and every house within sight — including his own — had lost their fences.
“It sounds like you got a jumbo jet sitting on the roof of your house,” Collins said by telephone of the wind roaring outside. “It really is so loud. It’s incredible.”
Thousands of people evacuated low-lying areas in the storm’s path on Monday. Hundreds of schools were closed yesterday and more than 50,000 households were without power.
“Conditions have deteriorated rapidly,” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in an address to Parliament.
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