Cyclone wrecks 1000 Q’ld homes; floods threaten

Press, 3 February 1986, Page 4

Cyclone wrecks 1000 Q’ld homes; floods threaten

Special correspondent Brisbane

North Queensland awoke yesterday to be confronted with the tragedies left by Cyclone Winifred.

The town of Innisfall was like a wrecker’s yard with tin roofing twisted round leaning telegraph poles from which overhead wires bounced on to the street.

At the Riverside Caravan Park in Innisfail, where about 30 people were moved out when the nearby Johnstone River began to flood, a caravan resident, Mr Pat Walden, said he was inside his caravan when a tree on the bank of the river was uprooted and toppled on to his van.

"I had just packed the stuff in the van and was ready to pull out. She (the tree) started to creak and

I just dived for cover. As I hit the floor it hit the roof.”

A young girl on Saturday afternoon was speared by a sheet of flying roof iron while she sat in her Innisfail home.

The police said that the sheet smashed through a bedroom window piercing the girl’s chest. She was in a critical condition yesterday in Cairns Hospital after being flown by helicopter from Innisfail. Engineers and architects were flown to the nearby coastal resort of Dunk Island early yesterday. Structural damage to resort buildings was minimal but the large trees and beautiful gardens which surround the resort were devastated.

The resort manager, Mr Barney Steven, said: “We used to be a tropical paradise. It’s a bit like scorched earth now.” The island’s $25,000 glass-bottom boat Ulysses

broke its mooring and has not been spotted. It is thought to have sunk somewhere between the island and the coast.

Earlier on Saturday afternoon a young man from Dubbo, New South Wales, a honeymooner on the island, watched a six metre tree crash through his cabin roof spraying glass and debris on the bed next to him. The areas worst affected by the cyclone were Babinda, where about 500 homes had substantial damage, and Innisfail, where 200 homes were badly damaged.

Several houses were demolished at Mission Beach, the Badama Island resort was in ruins, and scores of houses were unroofed at Babinda, Tully, Innisfail, Silkwood, Kurramine Beach, Cardwell, El Arish, South Johnstone and Mourilyan. At Babinda, a shop was demolished on Saturday

night with five people trapped inside. All were rescued. A conservative estimate was of 1000 houses extensively damaged and hundreds more with some damage along a 200 km coastal strip stretching from Cairns to Ingham. Cairns was almost totally blacked out in the cyclone, except for the inner-city area. Most coastal towns south of Cairns lost power at some time yesterday. King tides swept beaches along the coast and forced shipping to take shelter in protected harbours. The Insurance Council of Australia said yesterday that there was still no estimate of damage, but it was likely to run to tens of millions of dollars.

Ingham was preparing last night for one of the worst floods in its history in the wake of Cyclone Winifred.

State emergency service personnel and other volunteers were working yesterday to evacuate people from low-lying areas round the town and also from the Tully and Burdekin River catchment areas.

A police spokesman said rescue and relief efforts in the Innisfail and Ingham areas were hampered by jamming of the telephone systems. “With power out in most areas the only effective forms of communicationns at the moment are telephone and radio,” the spokesman said. “Heavy loading is being caused to the telephone system in the area by people trying to check on relatives and friends. “Telecom has disconnected all calls between Townsville and Ingham to try to avoid a complete collapse of the system,” he said.