Family learns that’s how life Goes in tropical Far North

GORDON Goes feared the worst as cyclone Larry approached.

He and his wife Joanne had just bought their Innisfail home and, with the category 4 storm bearing down on them, they were questioning the move. The former Westpac agribusiness manager’s thoughts were with his clients, who would lose so much.

“All my customers were devastated,” Mr Goes said.

“The effect of that was two years of hard work to get them through.”

The Goes suffered some damage – a shed and all its contents was blown away and there was damage to a patio.

But, by comparison, they felt they’d “won the lotto”.

“We’re halfway up the hill, and you could see houses were just flattened and gone,” he said. “My wife and I were looking at our house thinking, ‘it’s a solid house’.”

Like many in the Far North, LOCAL legend has it that a special, almost mystical, alignment between the mountains and the Reef somehow protects Cairns from frequent direct cyclone hits.

But the real reason Cairns has avoided the eye of so many large storms in living memory is, according to weather bureau forecaster Andrew Mostyn, simply “pure luck”.

“There is no reason,” he said. “You hear a lot of the locals talk about the ranges and the Reef but that’s false ... Innisfail has bigger mountains and the Reef and it’s been hit many times.

“It’s pure chance and that’s why complacency needs to be avoided. It’s only a matter of time. Cairns is a small dot on a map for something as big as a category five.”

Conditions must be perfect for a cyclone to form, including a sea temperature of more than 26 degrees, a tropical low, and “organised” thunderstorms surrounding the low.

“The thunderstorms around the low become organised and drive the energy from the warm ocean waters and the Earth’s rotation maintains the spin of the tropical cyclone,” Mr Mostyn said. the Goes would go through it all again just five years later when cyclone Yasi crossed in 2011.

But, yet again, they escaped relatively unscathed.