Entire suburbs in three North Queensland cities will be evacuated today as Cyclone Yasi powers towards the coast, bringing destructive winds, torrential rain, and massive storm surges.
Yasi is expected to be packing winds of up to 280 kilometres per hour when it makes landfall as a category four system somewhere between Cairns and Innisfail at around midnight on Wednesday.
Back in 1981, for just on eight months I lived in a cosy little beach house in Bay Street at idyllic Cape Pallarenda just north of Townsville. I had always dreamt of a tropical lifstyle by the sea, and there I had it all: a comfortable home overlooking the ocean, an enjoyable social life, and a well-paid and oh-so-easy permanent accounting job with a large national company.
Somehow my constant dissatisfaction with the status quo that had been my driving force for as long as I could remember made me throw it all in again when I received a single phone call asking me if I wanted to go back to contract work in Papua New Guinea. After New Guinea came Saudi Arabia and then Greece before I eventually returned to Cape Pallarenda in 1985. But there was no way I could recapture what I had left behind three years earlier and lack of employment forced me to leave for Sydney - and, as they say, the rest is history!
For many years I hankered to return to Queensland's tropical north and my spiritual home is still somewhere up there even though I sold the little beach house in early 2000.
Now I read that residents of Cape Pallarenda and other low-lying parts of Townsville are being evacuated and moved to higher ground as Yasi may bring with it storm surges and powerful flash floodings of up to four metres. I seem to have got out just in time by the tiniest of margins of a mere 25 years!
[Here] is more news on the cyclone preparations.
