Powerful cyclone nears Australia

CAIRNS – Police barked at stragglers to get off streets as one of Australia’s biggest-ever storms bore down on the northeast yesterday while residents huddled in evacuation centres or at home in bathrooms bunkered with mattresses.

Australian leaders issued dire warnings of potential devastation for cities and towns dotted along a stretch of the coast more than 300 kilometres long in the north Queensland state, in an area considered the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef.’This is a cyclone of savagery and intensity,’ Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in a nationally television news conference. ‘People are facing some really dreadful hours in front of them.’A few hours before Cyclone Yasi was due to make landfall, officials said it was too late for people to evacuate their homes and announced that shelters were closed, in an effort to keep people off the streets. Police at one centre in the city of Cairns turned people away saying it was full.Yasi roared coastward bearing destructive winds gusting up to 300 k/ph, and was expected to strike sometime between 22h00 and midnight yesterday. Satellite tracking showed a front some 500 kilometres across, with an eye that officials said would take around an hour to pass over any one point.It also will lash the coast with up to 700 millimetres of rain, and will send tidal surges far deeper inland than usual, the Bureau of Meteorology said.The bureau said most at risk was a band about 240 kilometres long between the tourist city of Cairns and the sugar cane-growing town of Ingham, though warnings stretched as far as Townsville, about 300 kilometres south of Cairns.Cairns, about 2 250 kilometres north of Sydney, has a population of some 165 000 people and Townsville as many more, with dozens of smaller communities interspersed between them.Queensland state officials have been telling people for days to stock up on bottled water and food, and to prepare homes by boarding or taping up windows. ‘It’s such a big storm – it’s a monster, killer storm,’ Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said, adding that the only previous storm measured in the state at such strength was in 1918. ‘This impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations.’Power supplies and mobile phone services were expected to be cut for thousands of people.- Nampa-AP