An Evening with Cyclone Yasi

We decided that if Yasi was a cat 3 or less to stay but when she bumped up to a very large 5 we decided to bail. We built our own house and were pretty sure it would be fine but in the rainforest with so many flying branches and falling trees it's hard to know for sure.

Our friend had graciously offered to house us in his underground bunker in South Johnstone. Ross has a beautiful garden and we've become friendly with him via our mutual interest in tropical plants.

Our first order of business was to get as many plants inside the house as possible. Thank God for tile floors!

It didn't take long to fill the entire living area and kitchen.

Of Course all our precious baby cordylines went inside.

We had to reinforce the roller doors at our Mate Ross's place.

We spent the night with him in South Johnstone.

Sean

Our Willing Worker on Organic Farms.

A view of the bunker from the top. Ross had invited us to spend the night at his place as he had an underground watertank that had been converted into a bunker under his shed.

Scott and Ross pretty stressed but still smiling. The plan was to go into the bunker if it got hairy in the shed.

Too hard to get Bikki and Lucy down into the bunker 

The Heeler Hotel. The older girls were happy in our truck, Ginger, the youngest was a giant pain in the ass.

It howled for most of the night. It sounded like a large spacecraft had landed on the shed. I was terrified, luckily the kids and our Wwoofer slept thru. The guys stayed on top with our two fat dogs. Thankfully Ross had built a Really strong shed!
I wish I had taken photos of the ceiling of the bunker. All the concrete was hand poured and you could see the joins. It was really interesting but seriously scarey at the same time. At one point the shed slab was vibrating on top of the bunker roof. I also had the odd fantasy about the shed falling down on the bunker exit and six of us being locked together for a very long time with only a bottle of rum, a can of tunafish and a few apples.

KIds in the bunker

We came out to lots of this!

Get set for the price of bananas to soar.

We had problems getting home due to flooding.

We we arrived to El Arish we found Yasi had smashed it.Our Post Office/General Store has no roof.

We made it to our house and found we had been smashed far worse than Cyclone Larry had smashed us.

 So much clean up to do :(

We will be adding photos of the clean up in other articles. Remember
WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER!!!!!