Reed All About It: The cyclone hits

First let me say that we're safe.
The storm hit Friday. Power went out towards the end of the storm, and stayed out for 5 days. We count ourselves lucky in that regard, as some people will be without for up to one month.
Cell service has been very spotty.
So we've felt really "off the grid". But, we're back up and running.
I thought I'd talk in this blog about the storm itself, never having been in a tropical cyclone. Next time (maybe tomorrow) I'll write about after the storm.

Several people around have said to us "Oh, you'd have been through cyclones before (meaning tornados), so you should be right." (Imagine in Aussie accent)
No, actually, they're quite different.
Tornados come on fast and, typically, leave fast. The destruction can be much more violent, destroying even the strongest of buildings. But they generally run a smaller, sometimes oddly selective path.
A cyclone (or hurricane to you Northern Hemispheries) comes as a strong, often slow moving storm, with plenty of warning. It moves slowly, and lasts for a relatively long time. The destruction to strong buildings is less, but the immense area affected brings destruction on a grand scale. The sustained powerful wind brings down vegetation, fells old trees, drops buckets of rain, lifts the sea swell, and covers the area in debris. Windows are broken, houses are flooded, powerlines are downed, trees crash into houses, roadways are covered. For over sixty miles around.

We spent Thursday preparing, and went to bed expecting the storm to hit around 8:00. It was an uneasy sleep knowing what was coming.
At 11:30 the rain was so heavy that our building fire alarm came on.
At around 4:00 I got a text message from the city recommending evacuation in certain areas (not us) due to the road closures that would come from flooding. Tricia checked the flood maps on the city website and called the information hotline, and it seemed that we would not be flooded. As I went down to check the building, neighbors were loading their car to evacuate. Needless to say, we couldn't sleep after that.

As the morning began, we had offers from many friends to evacuate to their homes further away from the sea and higher ground. But we stuck it out in our home. The owners assured us that the cinder-block walls and safety glass windows would hold strong. And they did.

We watched the news, and the updates kept us in anticipation as the storm both slowed and intensified. The time to arrival was moved from 8:00 to 10:00 to 11:00. Will kept asking "When's it going to start?" And slowly it strengthened, growing from a category 4 to a category 5, the strongest on the scale.
The rain and wind was present all day, gradually lifting in intensity through the morning. It finally peaked in strength for us around 12:00 and continued until 2:00. Two solid hours of strong winds, flooding rain, and watching trees fall outside our windows.
Power went out at 12:30.

Around 2:00 the winds slowed, the rain lessened, and we all took a deep breath.
I was in contact with a friend, another ER doctor who lives here and works in Rockhampton. We were to be on-call to be deployed to the Yeppoon ER if needed.
Thankfully we were not.
Once the rain settled down, we were able to get out and have a look around.