Cyclone Ului

We experienced our first cyclone this weekend.

First and last I hope.

The eye passed thru Airlie Beach about 1.5hrs north but I've heard winds here were up to 180km an hour.

Not fun.

The pounding rain I could handle, the howling raging wind however was something else.

We lost electricity between 10 and 11pm in Sat night (it was restored Mon about 5pm). Some people are still without :-(

The wind got wilder and wilder. By midnight all the girls were with us in our room but they were asleep.

I just couldn't sleep for the wind.

Then I heard the sound of tin and a l bit of a clunk and a few choice words later Michael and I were peering out our sliding glass doors with our torch.

The next door neighbour's shed roof had torn off and was dangling over our fence!

I was pretty scared by this so we relocated to our front room.

We all sat up for a bit (I was trying to keep it together because the girls certainly didn't seem as scared as I felt!).

Eventually we managed to get the girls back to sleep but I just couldn't sleep.

Whilst I had no electricity my iPhone still had Internet access so I checked out facebook to see how others were getting on and checked BOM website frequently.

An update told me the cyclone found land but still the wind roared!

I swore i could hear tin ripping again which further freaked me out (found out next morning across the road neighbours guttering ripped off).

Eventually fell to sleep sometime after 4am.

Neighbour woke us all up at 7am - he had come to fetch his shed roof which had made it's way half into our pool by now.

Quick survey revealed no damage (praise God) other than some broken plants.

We didn't have any mobile coverage at this point but the landline was working (it stopped working about 9am). Made a few calls to see how family had fared.

Michael's parents had some broken windows from lattice that lifted from their patio.

Amazingly my Mum's place was unscathed, although lots of plant damage and strewn about.

Driving around later that day revealed damage to fences, lots if uprooted trees and some trees on houses!

I've said to a few people now that I felt quite safe and secure in my house, I wasn't scared my house would rip apart, what I was scared of was something flying INTO my house - thank goodness nothing like that happened.

We are all so lucky. I'd be happy to never have to experience that again in my life.

Suz

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