Cyclone aftermath for Coastal Patrol

by Rob Kothe on 26 Mar 2006 Category 5 is a serious storm, as the residents of New Orleans know, still suffering from Hurricane Katrina. That's the category of cyclone that blasted Australia's far north Queensland coast a week ago. It hit the town of Innisfail and the local port of Mourilyan extremely hard, as Ed Connor, the Innisfail Volunteer Coastal Patrol Commander reports:

‘I am told we had 300 kph winds across the Harbour (140 knots).

‘On Sunday most of the boats in the harbour were taken into creeks and rivers, and those that stayed on the moorings ended up on the rocks. The boats that ran up little creeks and rivers are mostly OK - they just got knocked from bank to bank.

‘In the harbour, there are two fishing trawlers on the bottom, one on the rocks at the mouth of the harbour, and a yacht is up on the rocks at the mouth of the harbour; there is 40 foot ferro-cement boat with a whopping great hole in the side of it, sunk there too.

‘On Sunday morning we took our 44 foot Coastal Patrol boat a mile and a half up the creek and put it on our own special Cyclone mooring that we’ve used for the last 15 years. It was gone Monday morning. It has survived there before, but we’ve never had a Category 5 cyclone before.

‘Now this 12 tonne boat is 15m up the mangroves; it is going to be recovered by a salvage company coming down from Cairns next Tuesday.

‘It was the tidal surge that moved her into the mangroves; she took out the mangroves sideways as she went up. She is still attached to her three tonne concrete mooring block, with three inch chain and three inch rope.

‘The boat has a lot of dints and scratches but it doesn’t appear to be damaged. It is standing upright, which is a good thing for us.

‘We will be shifting our mooring to somewhere safer in the near future.

‘Generally the boats up the creek survived with no damage, but we’ve seen at least four written off - and a couple are recoverable because they are steel.

‘Back on Mourilyan Harbour, our Coastal Patrol building was built to withstand cyclones. It’s a concrete block building, with the walls all filled with concrete. It is all still there, except for broken windows and stuff like that. We were flooded - we are not sure the size of the tidal surge but we think it was about a metre. With the wind and the water, there was a lot of water so everything electrical is gone.

‘The antennas have just disappeared, torn off their fittings and all our repeaters are gone. We are off the air for at least a month, and probably off the water with the big boat for a couple of months.

‘The Insurance Company is covering everything and Australian Coast Guards nation-wide have started fundraising efforts to cover our excess on the insurance and any fuel that we use in generators and things like that.

‘Unfortunately the radios will be off for at least a month. We’ve got some smaller boats which will be ok.

‘Everyone is working really hard to get things back together as quickly as possible.

‘We’ve got water and sewage, but we haven’t got electricity, that will take a long time. It is a complete rewire down from the highway to the Mouraliyan Harbour.

‘The only phone that has been working for the past three days was mine because it was CDMA, so you can imagine it was just about melting, but now the mobile phones are back too...

‘Once thing are quieter I would say a good 60% of the fishing fleet will be back out there.

‘Now the sun is shining again and everyone is smiling.'