NIGHTMARISH EXPERIENCE
IWAS lying in bed in Room 12 on the upper storey of the old Riverside Motel in Innisfail on the night of March 19, 2006, listening to a light rain outside. The rain got heavier and the breeze freshened. No one slept. We all knew what was coming. The bureau had nailed it 100 per cent.
By 2am next day Larry entered centre stage. Softly at first and then, like an orchestra changing tempo, it reached crescendo. I can still hear the different noises the wind made as it cut along the edges of the building. It hissed. It shrieked. It sighed. It buzzed like a whippersnipper. And then there were moments when you would swear it was purring. I watched the raindrops explode into fine mist as they hit the window and then get carried away in a rolling fog by the wind.
By 5.30am things had worsened and the noise had become a loud, asthmatic wheeze. The noises coming through the walls from the outside were nightmarish.
It made me recall standing once in a darkened booth at the museum in Darwin listening to the sounds a broadcast journalist had taped of Cyclone Tracey.
I was hoping someone was taping the noises in Innisfail now with high fidelity equipment ( I’ve never heard of anyone who did it). By 5.50am it was intense. I was trying to remember to keep taking notes in timeline, but found I sometimes became so engrossed with what was happening outside and with making provisions for a fast exit, I’d forget to write down the times. I had already packed my belongings as I wasn’t confident the upper storey would hold together in the wind.
I’d packed them away in my car downstairs. I had already decided that the car would be refuge if the entire motel started to blow away.
There were other people staying there. Among them were evacuees from Flying Fish Point, Cairns- based freelance photographer Brian Cassey and the motel owners, Lindsay and Chris Graham.
By around 6am we had all decamped to the covered area outside motel reception. We stood there as dawn broke and literally watched the world blow by outside.
Sheets of iron and parts of roofs went sailing by so fast that if you blinked you would not see them. Lindsay stood for hours looking at cladding, timber and iron hurtling past in the wind. He didn’t say it, but he knew, and we all knew, that a lot of that material going past was from his motel. There was the tortured noise of timber and iron being torn loose from the hotel across the road.
At one stage Lindsay came down from upstairs and told me I would get a great photo from Room 16.
I went up the stairs, two others followed. As we walked towards the door of the room, which overlooked the river, part of the roof blew down towards me. I was in front and watched it as though in slow motion.
It was big and heavy and I thought it was going to hit me at waist level. The other two were close behind and I leapt back awkwardly. It thudded into the staircase just centimetres from my feet.
A woman sheltering with us downstairs was lying under a doona in shock. Her husband sat with her.
The “eye” hit and everything went quiet. We walked outside and surveyed the damage. Dead birds lay among the leaves of fallen trees down by the river. The road, everywhere we looked was covered with iron, broken timber, coconuts, bricks, signage and fallen trees. Powerlines were down, creating their own minefield. We watched, incredulous, as a young man emerged from the mist, going down Grace St towards the esplanade.
He was picking his way through the debris and the fallen wires. We asked what he was doing and if he knew this was just a lull and that the cyclone would be back any minute.
He said he was going to visit his girlfriend. We told him that he faced being caught out in the open. Even coconuts in this wind were deadly missiles. This was a wind, after all, that was carrying bricks. He kept walking, but upon getting to where Grace St junctions with the esplanade, he turned around.
It was eerily calm in the eye of the storm. I was worried I had left gear behind in Room 12 and took advantage of the eye to race up the stairs. The room, by now, was a mess. The sliding window had blown in covering everything with broken glass. Junk of all sorts, including lengths of timber, had blown in.
Water pooled on the bed. A large section of roof from another building had blown over and landed on the roof above my room. Part of it hung down across the open space where the window had been. And then Larry was back. No soft build- up. No warning. Nothing. It was as though there had never been an eye. It went from dead quiet to screaming wind in a moment. I headed for the door and as I did so I heard the roof above me coming apart. I sprinted down the hallway, the roof making an awful sound. I looked up and could see what looked like an earthquake tear- line zigzagging along the ceiling and roof. It was moving as though it was being unzipped.
By 10am it was all over. Brian Cassey and I ventured outside. We worked together all day, visiting people in their homes, some of them dazed, thankful to be in one piece. There they were standing in rooms inside what had once been houses with warm beds and kitchens and cupboards and albums filled with memories. Now there was no roofing left across rooms and items smashed against walls by the wind. There were houses that had steel girders blown horizontally through their walls. There were other houses that had been abandoned when the occupants took flight in the calm of the eye. There were residents who had spent the night in absolute terror after their roofs had been blown away early in the first minutes of the wind. Many had sheltered under mattresses or in cars. Recovery was a long way off.