TULLY, Australia — The most powerful storm in a century ripped across Australia’s northeast coast today, blasting apart houses, laying waste to banana crops and leaving boats lying in the streets of wind- and wave-swept towns.
Authorities said they were surprised to learn at daybreak that no one had been reported killed by Cyclone Yasi but cautioned that bad news could eventually emerge from communities still cut off after the overnight storm, which left several thousand people homeless.
“It was really terrifying, but we were safe,” said Barbara Kendall, who spent a sleepless night in a basement parking garage with her husband and four cats after being evacuated from their coastal home at Kurrimine Beach. “It’s a terrifying sound. It’s really hard to describe. All I could hear was the screeching of the wind.”
Emergency services fanned out to assess damage across a disaster zone stretching more than 190 miles in Queensland state, using chain saws to cut through debris blocking roads.
The main coastal highway was a slalom course of downed trees and power lines, surrounded by scenes of devastation: roofs peeled back from houses, fields of sugar cane and banana shredded and flattened, once-green expanses stripped to brown soil.
Cyclone Yasi was moving inland and losing power today. But drenching rains were still falling, adding woes to a state where Australia’s worst flooding in decades has killed 35 people since late November.
Hundreds of thousands of people had spent the night huddled in evacuation centers or bunkered in their homes as the cyclone hit, packing howling winds gusting to 186 mph and causing tidal surges that swamped coastal areas.
At Tully, about 12 miles inland along the storm’s path, the main street was littered with twisted pieces of metal that were once house roofs and jagged shards of glass from shattered shop windows. Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said one in three houses in the town of 3,500 people either were demolished by the storm or had the roof ripped off.
Tully and Mission Beach were among a handful of towns in a relatively narrow band that bore the brunt of Yasi’s fury as it stormed ashore.
Further south, emergency workers had cut their way into the coastal community of Cardwell this morning and found older houses wrecked and boats pushed up into the town, she said. The entire community was believed to have evacuated before the storm.
Along the coastal highway, tidal floodwaters periodically cut the highway, temporarily stranding convoys of people trying to return home to see what was left.
Electricity was cut to more than 180,000 houses in the region — a major fruit- and sugarcane-growing area and also considered a tourist gateway to the Great Barrier Reef — and police warned people to stay inside until the danger from fallen power lines and other problems was past.
