Australia: Mounting cost of Cyclone Yasi, the worst storm in 100yrs

AUSTRALIA was last night counting the cost of Cyclone Yasi, the 300-mile wide storm that caused a huge tidal surge as it hit landfall in the country's north-east yesterday.

So far, no fatalities have been reported from the storm which raged with winds of up to 170mph when it struck Queensland, sending waves crashing into seaside communities and shredding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of banana and sugar cane crops.

Last night Queenslander David Leger told how his family escaped when the roaring storm hammered their home, causing a noise like an explosion when it tore the roof off.

Mr Leger said once the roof was lost, the air was sucked up as if in a vacuum. "We gotta go", he shouted to his mother and father. The three scrambled downstairs, but the house shook violently, sending 83-year-old Francis Leger tumbling. The family finally made it to a small room on the ground floor, where they rode out the ferocious storm that slammed into the already flood-ravaged state yesterday.

"We're just thankful," David Leger said later as he stood on the drenched carpet of their ruined home, a puddle under his sandalled feet. "This is only material."

Residents and officials were amazed and relieved that no-one was reported killed by Yasi.

Officials said lives were spared because, after days of increasingly dire warnings, people had fled to evacuation centres or had bunkered down at home in cities and towns in Yasi's path.

Hundreds of houses were destroyed or badly damaged, and thousands of homes will be barely habitable until debris is cleared, officials said. Piles of sodden mattresses, stuffed toys, shattered glass and twisted metal roofs lay strewn across lawns in the hardest-hit towns.

Yasi began weakening after it came ashore early yesterday; at sea its winds gusted to 186mph. But it was still strong enough to threaten flooding late in the day in the Outback town of Mount Isa, about 500 miles inland.

It was a terrifying night for thousands who waited out the storm in their darkened homes. Sandy Haratsis was fighting off a panic attack as she lay on a mattress between her daughters' beds listening to the storm rage outside. Her wooden house was shaking, and she was worried about the roof.Suddenly, a bang rang out, followed by a whoosh. Her daughters screamed as rain began falling in through the ceiling. The roof was being peeled off.

"That's it! Downstairs!" she shouted at her daughters and her 69-year-old mother Verna Kohn. They fled to a small ground floor room and spent the night huddled on a bed of pillows, listening to the radio and praying the house would hold together.

"It was eerie and whistling and whirling and popping and girls screaming," Mrs Kohn recalled yesterday as she stood inside her waterlogged home. Everything was drenched: the furniture, the carpet, her floral curtains, the stacks of hand-sewn quilts she'd spent years carefully crafting. On the ground floor, water dripped through the ceiling into saucepans and buckets. Half her roof had been torn away and the windows ripped off. A neighbour's palm tree lay across her garden.

The disaster zone was north of Australia's worst flooding in decades, which swamped an area in Queensland state the size of Germany and France combined and killed 35 people before the waters subsided last month.

But the storm added to the state's woes, and is sure to add substantially to the estimated A$5.6 billion (33bn) in damage since late November. Government has announced a special tax to pay for the earlier floods.

Queensland premier Anna Bligh said several thousand people would be temporarily homeless, and Red Cross Australia and local governments were registering people in need and finding places to house them. It would take days to make a proper assessment of the damage, and fatalities could yet emerge.

"It's a long way to go before I say we've dodged any bullets," Ms Bligh said.

Emergency services minister Neil Roberts said more than 280 houses were damaged in the three hardest-hit towns, and emergency teams were unable to reach at least four others, so the tally would certainly rise.

Australia's huge, sparsely populated tropical north is battered annually by about six cyclones. Building codes have been strengthened since Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin in 1974, killing 71 in one of Australia's worst natural disasters.

"This was the worst cyclone this country has experienced, potentially, for 100 years, and I think that due to very good planning, a very good response … we've been able to keep people safe," Mr Roberts said.

Still, signs of devastation were everywhere. The main coastal highway was a slalom course of felled trees and power lines, fields of sugar cane and banana were torn apart and flattened, and lush hillside forests were stripped of every leaf.

Rudy Laguna, 53, picked his way through the drenched rubble of a house he owns in Tully. The roof had been peeled away, the windows were shattered and what was left of wooden slatted walls flapped in the wind. He paused on the verandah and looked up at what was once the ceiling to survey a cloudy sky.

"It's only timber and fibre," he said. "As long as no-one got hurt, it's OK."