Hundreds of residents on Australia’s remote northwest desert coast began mopping up on Friday after a powerful cyclone battered towns with destructive winds and torrential rain.
“We’ve still got beer and plenty of ice, so the pub will still be open,” Don Skipworth, a resident of the small town of Onslow directly hit by Cyclone Glenda, told local radio.
There were no reports of injuries or major damage after Glenda crossed the coast on Thursday night, but emergency officials fear widespread flooding with much of the area already under water after a series of cyclones this year.
Glenda, the second destructive tropical cyclone storm to hit Australia in 10 days, forced the evacuation of hundreds of people in larger towns, shut down oil and gas rigs and disrupted iron ore shipments in the region.
Glenda was one of the most powerful cyclones, rated a category four, with winds up to 145 mph. The cyclone has now been downgraded to a category two, after crossing the coast at Onslow, 860 miles north of the Western Australia state capital of Perth.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology says Glenda will move further inland and gradually weaken.
“There is still potential for people in the path of the cyclone to get some destructive wind gusts over the course of today and into tomorrow,” said weather forecaster James Ashley.
“Certainly (there is a risk of) flooding over a wide area of the northwestern and central and western parts of the state.”
Australia’s northwest coast is known as “cyclone alley,” with tropical storms annually battering the remote area, and emergency officials said the minor damage from Glenda was a result of cyclone-proof buildings and local cyclone disaster plans.
“We haven’t had anywhere near the damage expected. It has been really minor like downed trees and downed powerlines,” said a spokeswoman for the Fire and Emergency Services Authority.
Emergency services plan to fly volunteers in to help in the recovery process. “We’ve got choppers on standby to ferry them in if we have to fly them in, because they may not be able to drive in,” said State Emergency Services spokesman Peter Mancini.
It was feared Glenda could be as destructive as category five Cyclone Larry, which destroyed homes and crops on Australia’s northeastern coast earlier this month. State officials breathed a sigh of relief earlier on Thursday after Glenda tracked passed Karratha, where about half the region’s 14,000 people live.
