30 thoughts on “No fatalities reported so far”

  6. Well Queensland got away with this one very lightly. Downgraded very quickly and luckily came ashore in a very low population area and at right angles to the shore. Would have been a real mess if it had hit Cairns straight on.
    Should have seen the Gulf after Camille hit, it ran parallel to the coast and took the lot for miles and miles going 190mph nearly all the way along!
    Trouble is is the flimsy construction, look at the framework above, frankly a couple of men could push it over! But then if it is going to collapse the lighter the better! You can’t win ’em all and some places you don’t seem to be able to win any of them!! Housing is like it here too, especially in the South that gets hit all the time, sort of disposable houses. Better than dying under masonry anyway!
    What you need is a root cellar.

  7. Sometimes I despair of you, Christina dear (sighs resignedly) –

    Well Queensland got away with this one very lightly. Downgraded very quickly and luckily came ashore in a very low population area

    Do you ever actually read the News?
    Somehow I doubt it.

    Our record floods were equated to a puddle, and now the largest, most powerful cyclone ever recorded globally is dismissed as a mere nothing. FFS, it’s still a Cat 2, although it’s well inland.

    I enjoy your splenetic posts and comments, but do keep a grip on reality, dear! 🙄

  8. Phew – Lucky or what? Queensland has just survived one of the biggest cyclones in history, many of our industries were devastated and quite a few towns were virtually destroyed but it doesn’t appear like we had any fatalities, one day we’ll probably look back on all this and call it a miracle 🙂

  9. Thank goodness there are no fatalities. The destruction is huge and it will take a long time for life to be normal again. But it is heartening no life was lost. As the Queensland Premier said, lives cannot be replaced.

  10. The industries are badly damaged – but it would seem that many houses seem to have survived – albeit missing their roofs!

  11. I am glad that things have not turned out as badly as they might, but there still seems to have been a lot of destruction. At least no one was seriously injured, as far as we can tell. I hope the clear up goes well and quickly.

  12. Well it seems the authorities agree with me, you got away lightly, and from the looks of the photos, it was mostly only shacks that were destroyed, hopefully the rebuilding will improve the neighbourhood!
    category 2 is down to 100mph winds and those only in a very limited zone. You want to try living in Pembrokeshire. Regularly 60 mph gusting to 80mph, they don’t even bother calling it anything!
    Try standing on St Anne’s Head on a bad day, nearly lost spousal unit, tried to let go of the car, we went to see the waves breaking over the tops of the cliffs, the cliffs are over 100′!
    Trouble is most people don’t live in places where there is foul weather on a regular basis, personally I like it, keeps all sorts of undesirables out! A small price to pay for homogeneity.
    I would much prefer a surfeit of water to that of mosques. Mind you, might be handy to have the odd magic flying carpet.

  13. Fairy nuff, Christina.

    Our banana and sugar cane industries are all but wiped out, and the cost is estimated at over $1 billion, but Cairns and Townsville were not directly hit, so yes, there are fewer people without homes than there might have been. And after all, it was only Australians, not real people.

  14. Poor Australians , not only are they forced to live in $500,000 shacks that are the only things that can withstand a Class 5 Cyclone’s ferocity and then have to bear the brunt of Nth Queenslands notorious 180Km/h wind gusts we get here on a regular basis, now the XXXX factory is under water. 😦

  15. Come come, sugar cane is an annual crop and banana trees will grow back their tops. It is only this year’s crop that has taken a wipe out.
    Donald, any bugger that paid more than half a crown for the shack above was robbed.
    Now then with the 4X factory you have a point!

  16. Christina

    We are being told that these plantations will take years to recover.

    One fatality – a guy sitting in an enclosed space with a generator.

  17. Bo, that is a very young plantation, look at the diameter of the trees. I really don’t know why these people exaggerate so, setting themselves up for putative insurance losses one wonders or is it the hysterical media? Nature restores itself so very quickly especially in heat. I have seen banana plantations hacked back to virtually trunks only in Madeira to keep them small for ease of picking and they fruit regularly every year.

    Re sugar cane, it is a perennial but treated as an annual, ie cut to the ground every year and is renewed by cloned cuttings when production yields drop, so that will be running absolutely full blast next year. I can’t actually see why blown down stems could not be harvested from the ground either. If they are not ripe they will obviously hold less sugar content but well may be salvageable to a degree.

    I think it very wrong the way the whole thing is presented by the media, too many of the weak minded believe the whole tarradiddle hook line and sinker. Too much hysteria by half!

  19. Christina

    Yes it is a young plantation – there was a cyclone (Larry) in 2005 which ‘wiped’ out the crop then.

    To be honest, I don’t have much time for the banana growers. After Larry, they tried very hard to ban imports to keep up the price of what they could produce. I think they forgot that people can survive quite well without eating any bananas!

    I have noticed that whoever’s being interviewed is saying that they won’t be able to go back into production without large government aid… They probably need reminding again that we can manage without bananas!

    Thanks for the information. 🙂

    Indeed – what a prat!

  25. That was a pun, Araminta. A poor, weak feeble thing, but mine own. 😕
    “None of us are” – and sod the pedants! Nearest noun or pronoun takes precedence in my book.

  27. christinaosborne :

    Come come, sugar cane is an annual crop and banana trees will grow back their tops. It is only this year’s crop that has taken a wipe out.
    Donald, any bugger that paid more than half a crown for the shack above was robbed.
    Now then with the 4X factory you have a point!

    No, I don’t have a point, if I did I’d be drinking it and …. oh sorry …”point” I thought you meant “Pint” 🙂

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