Australians cower before the force of monster cyclone (News Feature)

By Sid Astbury Feb 2, 2011, 1:41 GMT

Sydney - A tempest is coming and staff at the Coffee Club cafe on the Cairns waterfront are sticking masking tape on the front windows in the optimistic hope that the glass will only crack when hammered by wind gusts faster than the Queensland holiday town's fastest car.

Foreign backpackers, a rare sight so early in the morning in this Great Barrier Reef party town, trudge by on their way to higher ground as the clock ticks down to the arrival of Cyclone Yasi, a maximum category-five storm on the scale measuring the strength of cyclones.

At the Barbeques Galore camping shop there are bare shelves after shoppers snapped up gas bottles, stoves and emergency rations in expectation that the power will go off, perhaps for days.

A group of Chinese tourists just arrived on a flight from the Gold Coast are told a cruise to the reef is off the itinerary and are herded into the departure lounge for the 1,700-kilometre flight to Brisbane.

Elderly people are shown being turfed out of nursing homes and patients in their hospital beds wheeled to Hercules C-130s for evacuation in military transport planes.

There are queues at petrol stations as families fill up the car and head for the hills that overlook Cairns, a town of 122,000 that unwisely was built on a swamp.

Scenes like these have Australian television viewers wondering what further pestilence Mother Nature has in store for Queensland. A plague of frogs?

Just weeks ago, an area of the state the size of France and Germany combined was under water after the worst flooding in living memory. More than 30,000 homes were inundated, roads and railways wrecked and three quarters of the state's coal mines knocked out.

'I wouldn't say it's a mass panic but people are certainly getting in here for the items they need,' grocery shop owner Terry Walters told the Cairns Post newspaper amid shelves cleared of tinned food and long-life milk.

At the Bunnings hardware store along the street, a staff member told the paper that supplies of masking tape, rope and generators were hard to get because of last month's epic flooding.

'We do generally have more stock in of those cyclone items but they've been low lately because the roads were cut due to the floods,' she said. 'So, just as we started to build up stock and it's gone again.'

It must be a bit of a worry for townsfolk when the only two hospitals in Cairns make history by being the first in the state ever to have their patients evacuated.

'It's only being done to make sure that the very ill, very vulnerable patients are in the safest place possible,' Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said.

Bligh has warned of Yasi's likely trail of death and destruction, so the inference is that Cairns Base and the Cairns Private Hospital are being put on red alert for casualties.

At the airport those shown departing are the old, the infirm or holidaymakers; those arriving are emergency service workers or the military.

Around 30,000 have left low-lying areas in and around Cairns and around 9,000 more are expected to be ordered out before the forecast nightfall arrival of Yasi.

Most of the tourists have gone and the boats that usually crowd Cairns harbour have been shifted to moorings among the mangroves in river estuaries.

At Port Douglas, 70 kilometres north of Cairns, Doug Ryan told Australia's AAP news agency that around 150 boats had been taken four kilometres inland to makeshift berths.

'We have the best cyclone anchorages in Queensland, here in Port Douglas,' he said.

Ryan, a tourism industry luminary whose house is on the waterfront, is not so confident of his home surviving the mammoth storm now approaching.

'If there's a 3-metre tidal surge on top of the high tide, I could be in trouble,' he said.

The estimate is that as well as wind gusts of around 280 kilometres per hour and massive downpours of up to 1 metre, the tide will be pushed 2.5 metres above the high-water mark.

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