Cyclone Yasi: Cleaning up

Friday morning was the first day that I felt like we were truly "post-cyclone".  From Friday until Sunday, Andy and I went for lots of sight-seeing walks, ate much more (and much more richly) than we normally do to eat up everything before it went off, and spent a lot of time sitting around fanning ourselves and trying not to die from heat.

First, we cleaned up.  Except, we don't have a proper garden, so we don't really have garden tools.  So we improvised.  I swept, with a broom - the back courtyard, including the walls, which had been blasted with broken bits of leaves.  It started out like this:


And we ended up with a pile like this:


Then Andy and I moved out to the front and continued sweeping.  We swept all in front of our unit and the one next door, and then went down to #5 and #6, where some older women live.  We opted not to clean in front of the two middle units, because they are occupied by able-bodied young people like us, who can clean up themselves!  The front went from this:


To this:


We also helped ourselves to some pawpaws from the leaning pawpaw tree down at the other end of our unit block.


Then we walked up to Aplin's Weir along the bike path, and back through the suburbs.  I got a sunburn, and blisters, but the damage to the vegetation and houses along the river was much worse than my minor suffering.












We walked past Rising Sun Honda, where people were lined up out the door for generators.


Our neighbours spent a few days having a go at the tree across the road with axes.  Someone came along with a chain saw, to everyone's relief, and then some other neighbours used their truck to pull the still-huge tree pieces off the road.


Later, someone with a bobcat came and cleared further, so our street was once again passable (and it wasn't even an hour before we had hoons coming through!).


A different walk in another direction looked much the same - trees down, a few on houses, and massive piles of vegetation.






On Sunday we had to go in to the uni so I could pick up material I needed to teach the next day up in Cairns, and we got a bit of a broader view of the cyclone damage.

Annandale had loads of uprooted trees.


The uni didn't get off lightly either.






An evening walk on Sunday night was incredibly frustrating -- a kilometre or so from our house, we noticed lots of lights on.  As we returned home, we got very hopeful.  Then, two streets before ours, it got dark again.  And stayed dark, until one street beyond ours.  So, an area of about 2 or 3 blocks was without power, and we were in it.  The worst part was that our very street had electricity on, just 30 metres away from us.  There was even a streetlight lit up just outside our house.  Very frustrating.  Especially as one of the residents in our unit block had been running a very noisy generator since Saturday.  He had set it up in his courtyard, which meant that the fumes and noise was worst in the bedroom of our unit.  So we had to drag the mattress out to the living room in order to have open windows.

Post-Cyclone Food
Andy and I are both fans of not-wasting-food.  And we had planned ahead by filling the freezer with water bottles, which kept things pretty cold for a few days.  So it wasn't until Saturday that we really started throwing food away, though we had been without power since Wednesday night. Part of the reason is that we're not as precious about temperatures as we probably should be.  But, not having a fridge & freezer full of dead animals and dairy really helps, too!  Some of our post-cyclone meals...

For lunch on Friday, a container of bean salad that had been in the freezer, mixed with ceylon spinach, sundried tomatoes and olives (both of which actually survived without refrigeration quite well), and dill pickles (which I didn't want to leave at room temperature for long).


Friday dinner was a big curry - a block of tofu, a bag of veggies that were in the freezer and were all but thawed, a tin of coconut milk, and half a jar of rogan josh paste.


For Saturday breakfast, we had oats cooked with soy milk (asceptic cartons which we opened in the morning and used within a day, so Andy could have cups of tea) and bananas.


We ate lots of fruit - fruit leather and bananas that had been gifted to us after Yasi knocked down a friend's trees.  We also finished off a grapefruit that had been in the fridge, and some pawpaw from the tree in our unit block.


Saturday lunch was a much bigger lunch than we are used to.  Tofu, fried up with spinach and noodles from the freezer, and coated in half a jar of homemade BBQ sauce that had been in the fridge (and another pickle).


On Saturday afternoon, we took two batches of seitan from the freezer - they were defrosted but still cold.  Andy marinated one in a whole bunch of lemon juice we'd kept in the freezer, thinking the acidity would stop anything bad from growing.  The other batch was covered in dukkah, which we also store in the freezer.


For dinner that night, we cooked up a pack of still-cold hotdogs that had been frozen, and the dukkah seitan, and ate them wrapped up in mountain bread, with more spinach.


On Sunday we tasted our tofutti cream cheese and it wasn't off, so we  decided to eat it up.  We fried up the lemony seitan and wrapped it up with cream cheese and spinach for a late lunch.  We were so full that we decided to forego dinner that night.


A few things didn't make it at all - cooked beans, in both the fridge and freezer, started fermenting fairly quickly.  Ditto with the soaked soy beans.  We didn't even attempt to save the vegan mayo.  We also had to throw out the bananas, ginger, frozen spinach and chillis from the freezer.  Nacho had a big feed of frozen corn and peas before we threw the rest.  But other than that, jams, nuttelex, and curry pastes lasted the distance.  Our freezer houses lots of stuff that doesn't have to be frozen, like chia seeds, flax seeds, and yeast, so we just re-froze them when the power came back on and they seem alright.  And our ceylon spinach, which we had harvested in anticipation of the cyclone, lasted really well in a big tupperware container for about 6 days.  So all up, though it was annoying and hot with no electricity, we managed just fine, thanks to ice bottles, a camp stove, and strong stomachs.

On Monday morning I went to the airport early and headed up to Cairns to teach an intensive class, while Andy went back to uni to sit in air conditioning and use the internet do some work.  When he came home that afternoon, the fans were spinning and we were back in business.  So although there are still massive piles of debris waiting to be cleared up around town, that was basically the end of our Cyclone Yasi experience.

If you want to see more photos, you can check out my flickr set, the Tropical Cyclone Yasi flickr group, or the Townsville Bulletin galleries.

Cyclone Yasi: Weathering the Storm

Picking up where I left off, the power went out around 5.30 on Wednesday evening. At this point it was windier than normal, but not dramatically. We looked outside and there was a tree down from the neighbour's house, completely blocking our street. We watched out the kitchen window as our idiot neighbours (from the other side) walked outside in the wind and rain to have a look – bringing their not-yet-teenage children out with them. They sent one of the kids back in after a few minutes, but only to fetch them cold beers. Talk about responsible parenting choices.

Because the power was off, it got pretty warm pretty quickly – we don't use aircon at home, but the lack of fans was definitely noticeable. But we realised how lucky we were. The wind was coming, at that point, from the south. Our unit is on the north end of our unit-block, so we were able to leave our windows open until 10pm or so, without too much blowy-ness.

We spent lots of time watching the wind whip the palm trees from the kitchen window.

When it got a bit darker, we could only see the silhouettes, but it was pretty clear that the wind picked up speed progressively.

All the while, Nacho slept through the storm. She's normally a major scaredy-cat, so we were surprised how utterly unfazed she managed to remain.

We snacked on cold sausage rolls, cooked earlier in the day, throughout the night. Our only battery powered radio is a bit insufficient: it plays FM only, and it needs earphones. So much of the time, Andy and I were squeezed together despite the heat, sharing one set of earbuds so we could hear the local radio.

After we shut the windows it got oppressively hot inside, so I ripped apart a shoebox to make a fan to cool us off ever so slightly. Then, as the storm got even worse and the wind howled around us, Andy and Nacho both fell asleep. I did a crossword puzzle by candlelight, listened to the radio, hoped the noises I was hearing on the roof were branches and not our roof blowing off. Between 12 and 1, the eye of the cyclone crossed between Cardwell and Mission Beach – around 200kms north of Townsville. Then the wind changed direction, coming at us from the east this time. By 3am, the windows hadn't blown out, the roof was still attached to the walls, and it was starting to (barely) calm down a bit. So we went to bed. I woke up a few more times, but by morning it was clear that we had made it through unscathed. It was still a bit blowy on Thursday morning, but much less than the night before.

We went outside, but not far. We had a peek at the downed tree, crossing the street just beyond our driveway.

We walked up in the other direction, but were quickly stopped by downed power lines in every direction. Since the wind was still blowing, we didn't want to take any silly risks.

We noticed that traffic poles had a bit of an angle that hadn't been there before.

And we saw a smashed window at Liquor Land.

On closer inspection, though, we concluded that it wasn't cyclone damage. There was a rock just outside the broken glass, and just inside were two bottles of booze that looked like they'd been quickly abandoned.

We went back inside, fired up the campstove, and made a cup of tea.

Then we hung around and waited for things to settle. I had a nap, we listened to the radio, read books, did crosswords, and played cards. We snacked on some carrot sticks and green hummus - chickpeas with spinach and also sundried tomatoes - which Andy had blended up the day before, when we still had power.  The fridge stayed cold overnight, but by morning we emptied out the important stuff into an esky bag with a bottle of ice, but we left things like jam in the still-slightly-cool fridge.


Since the power was out, we wanted to keep the freezer shut for as long as possible, to keep the cold from the ice bottles in. So for dinner that night, we made pasta with sauce – a jar of pasta sauce with added beans, carrots, and spinach.

We ate by candlelight, which may have been romantic if it wasn't so... dark.



While we were eating, the army rolled up.  I thought they were there to clean up the tree blocking the road... but they left a few minutes later.

And we went to sleep almost as soon as the sun went down – at around 7.30pm – and slept like logs until well after the sun came up the next morning. Then, the weather was good, and it definitely felt like the storm was over – so I'll be back with a final post about our clean-up and sight-seeing adventures.

Cyclone Yasi: Preparing for the worst

The appearance of Cyclone Yasi was not a sudden thing - it was a big storm that weather-watchers were keeping their eyes on for maybe a week before it formed into an official Tropical Cyclone.  And although its projected track changed by a few hundred kilometres over the course of BoM tracking, it was pretty true to the predictions, especially when most cyclones are characterised by their zippy unpredictability.  As a result of all this, we had plenty of time to get prepared for the massive storm that was bearing down on North Queensland.

The town was buzzing even on the weekend, but it reached a fever pitch on Tuesday.  Andy and I went into work in the morning, and I got absolutely no work done.  I talked to lots of people about the weather, visited the ATM so we had plenty of cash on hand, looked at the Townsville City Council storm inundation maps, and realised that even though we live a few kilometres from the coast, we were likely to flood if the conditions were right.  So we ended up leaving uni by lunch time so we had plenty of time to get our unit ready.

We went into Reid Park and tried to fill up some sandbags, thinking we could make a barrier on both doors and maybe the garage roller-door, too.  That way, if there was less than 50cms or so of water in our area, we wouldn't get it inside the house, and our couch and carpets would be saved.  We were met with a bit of chaos - they were out of sand, and out of bags, and there was no one around who looked like they had any clue what was going on.  More sand arrived pretty quickly, and Andy started helping fill sandbags for an elderly couple, and I carted them over to their car.  While we were doing that, more bags arrived.  In the blink of an eye, the vultures in the crowd snapped up 1000 bags and we were left with none.  The woman we'd been helping felt bad for us, so she snavelled a few from someone with a very big stack.  In the end, we filled up 10 sandbags - any more than that would have probably over-worked our little Subaru, anyways.


We also set about handling food that wouldn't last if the power went out for several days.  For dinner, we emptied the freezer of spring rolls and sausage rolls, we used up the mushrooms from the fridge, and threw some wedges on the side for good measure.

We blended up a few bunches of bananas generously given to me by Dee and BoaB, and filled the dehydrator to make fruit leather. Andy took the campstove out of storage, where it has sat, unused, since we bought it a few cyclone seasons ago.  He wisely suggested that we should figure out how to use it, and if it even worked, before we desperately needed it.


We went to bed that night a bit early, anticipating a poor night of sleep on Wednesday, since the cyclone was predicted to cross the coast overnight between Wednesday and Thursday.  We were abruptly awoken at 2.45 by a succession of three text messages from the QLD government, telling those in storm surge areas to evacuate by 8am on Wednesday.  We got up, checked the forecast map - Yasi had been predicted to cross just north of Cairns when we went to bed, but by now it was moving progressively south, and was to cross at Innisfail.  Then we tried to get back to sleep.  At 5.45, I was awoken yet again, this time by the Townsville City Council - "You are in a storm surge area and will be doorknocked by 9am if mandatory evacuations are required".  That was enough to wake me up for the day.  We decided that we would stay at home, unless we were evacuated.  I started pulling in all the plants from outside.


We harvested all of our climbing ceylon spinach and moved the biggest planters to the wall.  Our courtyard never looked so clean!



We checked in with our neighbours, and filled up plenty of water containers.  We had about 60 litres at room temperature in these jugs, but smaller bottles filled up the freezer.



At 10am we set up the sandbags in front of the front door.



And inside the back door.


By 11am, the rain started with a vengeance.  It didn't end up sticking around for too long, and ultimately we didn't get much rain from the cyclone, but it definitely marked the start of the storm.



We taped crosses over the windows.



We wrapped up our important stuff in plastic bags.



Then we took everything off the shelves, and walls, and put them into our cyclone containers


(after Nacho vacated, of course).



And then, we waited.  We were bunkered down, and as ready as we could be.  We kept a close eye on the BoM site, listened to the radio, and listened as the wind picked up.  At 5.30, we lost power.  And that is where I will return in another post.

Yasi.

Some of you have heard about the super-cyclone that recently battered the coast of North Queensland, including Townsville, where I live.  We have been without power since Wednesday afternoon, and may still be - I'm currently in Cairns overnight for a teaching engagement, but when I get back I'll post about our experience - this is just a quick note to let anyone who's reading know that Andy, Nacho and I all survived!