Queensland Cyclone

It looks like Mission Beach (where we spent an amazing week living a rainforest lodge in 2002) may have been very badly hit by Cyclone Larry last night.

News reports are focusing on the town of Innisfail at the moment, probably because it’s the most populated area and the eye of the storm appears to have passed overhead there; but looking at the weather satellite images the storm was huge, so there’s going to be a lot of people affected.

The place we stayed is approximately 14 miles from where the storm centre hit the land. Around the same time, the main storm area was about 200 miles in diameter.

The huts are in the rainforest just up from Bingil Bay, and it sounds like the area has had a battering.

Ms Welch said the landscape was usually dense with rainforest, but “all of a sudden it is just open and we can see the hill in front of us. We can see houses in the next street we couldn’t see before.”

Hope you’re all ok folks.

Cyclone Larry

By overlaying satellite images from the last 24 hours I’ve been able to fairly accurately model the path and the extent of the storm.

The extent of cyclone:
The extent of Cyclone Larry

The path of the cyclone:
The path of Cyclone Larry

Google Earth Model

To view this model of cyclone Larry in 3D get Google Earth (it’s free).

2 Comments

Rich says:

24/03/2006 at 12:56

This report from The Townsville Bulletin (four days after the cyclone) starts to describe the extent of the devastation to Mission Beach and it’s rainforest. It suggests 60% of the vegitated area has beem torn apart.

This report in The Age, describes why the extent of the damage is bad news for the rainforest in general.

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Rich says:

26/04/2006 at 14:49

Looks like our friends in the rainforest were hit very hard by Cyclone Larry. A short piece on the Sanctuary Retreat website sums up the damage:

…thankfully and remarkably, no loss of life or serious injury. Unfortunately the beautiful rainforest at Sanctuary was not so lucky with extensive damage to most of the buildings. However the forest will regrow, the buildings will be rebuilt and we are hoping that Sanctuary will be re-born by the first of September 2006.

Gutted.

If you’ve never been to a rainforest then it’s difficult to comprehend the humidity and the difficulty in doing anything other than flopping about dreaming of the cool drink that you’re going to need as soon as you’ve finished the one you’re holding.

Doing anything there is hard work.

One of the most amazing things you can see when you visit the retreat is the photo’s that Paul and Susan took when they were originally building the Long House. It would be pointless to put those photo’s on the web because to appreciate the work that went into the place you have to be sat there, in the heat, knowing that just turning the pages is causing you to break into a sweat.

In all that heat, they built the whole place themselves, and built it to exacting environmentally friendly specifications, it was a truly inspirational place to visit, and I’m sure it will be again.

In case the simplicity of the place is lost on anyone… here’s a photo of the hut we stayed in. It’s about 50 feet from the camera, dead centre.

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