Australians assess their latest natural disaster (News Feature)

By Sid Astbury Feb 3, 2011, 4:40 GMT

Sydney - Australians thought they would be busy counting bodies Thursday rather than counting banana crop losses after the first category-five cyclone since 1918 lashed the north-east coast.

Cyclone Yasi was the same strength but three times the size of Hurricane Katrina that in 2005 killed over 1,800 people when it made landfall around the US city of New Orleans.

In contrast, Yasi proved to be a fizzer.

'It would seem we were blessedly fortunate,' said Ian Stewart, Queensland's deputy police chief and the state's disaster response coordinator. 'Without doubt, we're set to encounter scenes of devastation and heartbreak on an unprecedented scale,' Queensland Premier Anna Bligh had predicted. 'This cyclone is like nothing we've ever dealt with before as a nation.'

As it turned out, no deaths and no injuries were reported. Damage was nowhere near as serious and widespread as Bligh had warned it would be. Apart from the bananas.

Almost all of Australia's bananas are grown around Mission Beach, 140 kilometres south of Cairns, where Yasi raced ashore at midnight on Wednesday. The region is also home to a third of sugar cane growers.

'We've copped a real hiding. Looking out now, there's hardly any trees,' Banana Growers Council president Cameron Mackay told local television when viewing the damage to his own banana groves.

When Cyclone Larry hit in around the same spot in 2006, the damage bill came in at 1.5 billion Australian dollars (1.5 billion US dollars).

Australia does not export bananas, but most of its cane sugar is shipped abroad. World sugar futures prices rocketed to a 30-year high in response to the onrush of Cyclone Yasi.

Canegrowers Queensland chief executive Steve Greenwood tagged the cost of lost production at 500 million Australian dollars. But rising prices will help growers crimp their losses.

Mission Beach, right in the eye of the storm, is a shambles. The small resort and farming town of 6,000 people took winds of 285 kilometres per hour.

And while locals said it looked as if a nuclear bomb had hit, there were no deaths, no casualties and every likelihood that in a year's time the place will be spick and span again.

Officials like Deputy Police Chief Stewart are being asked whether they were too alarmist in the lead up to Yasi's arrival. In its aftermath, they have been quick to say how right they were in sounding the alarm but how wrong they were in their assessment of the possible damage.

As the warnings went out and evacuations began, convoys of motorhomes headed south down the Bruce Highway. The drivers were mostly retired Australians giving up on Queensland after this latest natural disaster.

Last month the state was awash with the worst floods on record, stranding some holidaymakers and wrecking the vehicles of others.

The floods proved worse than predicted, leading some to suggest that officials tried to get it right with Yasi by talking up the possible destruction.

When Cairns and other airports open, tourists will again pile out of the region.

'From a tourism point of view, people still think that half of Queensland is under flood and now they think the other half has a cyclone,' said Neil Scanlon, who as chief executive had to order the evacuation of Accor Group's 10 hotels in Queensland.

Industry lobby group Tourism Queensland said 10 million Australian dollars would be spent on a marketing campaign to change that perception.

'We need to say that Queensland is ready and that the worst is over and that places like the Gold Coast have been, to a large extent, untouched and we want your business,' the group said in a statement.

The damage bill from Queensland's floods alone has been estimated at 5-20 billion Australian dollars. The charge for the cyclone damage will add at least 1 billion Australian dollars to that.

'It looks like this is going to be, in economic terms, the largest natural disaster in our history,' Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan said. 'It will involve billions of dollars of (federal) money and also state government money and there are going to be impacts on local governments as well.'

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