Tully: First came the terrifying roar, then a violent bang as if something had exploded.
"We gotta go!" David Leger screamed to his father as one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in Australia tore the roof off their home, sucking the air up and out of the room like a vacuum.
Leger and his parents scrambled down the staircase, but the house shook violently, sending 83-year-old Francis Leger tumbling down the stairs.
The family finally made it to a small room on the ground floor, where they rode out the ferocious storm that slammed into the already flood-ravaged Queensland state yesterday.
"We're just thankful," David Leger said later as he slogged across the drenched carpet of their ruined home, water pooling around his sandalled feet. "This is only material."
Residents and officials were amazed and relieved that no one was reported killed by the monstrous Cyclone Yasi, which roared across northern Queensland with winds up to 280 kilometres per hour.
Tidal surges sent waves crashing ashore two blocks into seaside communities, several small towns directly under Yasi's eye were devastated and hundreds of millions of dollars of banana and sugarcane crops were shredded.
Warnings helped
Officials said lives were spared because, after days of increasingly dire warnings, people followed instructions to flee to evacuation centres or bunker themselves at home in dozens of cities and towns in Yasi's path.
Hundreds of houses were destroyed or seriously damaged, and the homes of thousands more people would be barely livable until the wreckage was cleared, officials said. Piles of drenched mattresses, sodden stuffed animals, shattered glass and twisted metal roofs lay strewn across lawns in the hardest-hit towns.
The region is considered a tourist gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, but whether the storm caused damage to the reef was not yet known.
Experts say that cyclones can cause localised reef damage as they cross over, and that under normal circumstances they will recover.
Yasi began weakening after it came ashore early yesterday. But it was still strong enough to threaten flooding late in the day in the Outback town of Mount Isa, about 800 kilometres inland.
Panic attack
It was a terrifying night for thousands who waited out the storm in their darkened houses. Sandy Haratsis was fighting off a panic attack as she lay on a mattress between her daughters' beds listening to the cyclone rage outside.
The two-story wood house was shaking, and she was worried about the roof. Suddenly, a bang rang out, followed by a whoosh.
Her daughters screamed as raindrops began falling onto them through the ceiling. The roof was peeling away.
