The last few days have been...different...to say the least. We shut down the office at work on Tuesday lunchtime. We spent the next 24 hours packing up stuff because we live at a beach suburb and were hearing at that point stories of 6m storm surges. That would have come at least through the ground floor of our house. Yay. We moved to my parents' in law's house in a different suburb (more importantly, a higher suburb).Anyway, by Wednesday lunchtime Yasi had headed further south than previously forecast and we decided that home was where we wanted to be so we left my car, full of all our electrical stuff at Kewarra Beach and headed home.
I must admit of all the things I thought I would be doing Wednesday night, sleeping was not one of them. However, I was exhausted and fell asleep on the sofa. Occasionally I woke up as lots of flying leafs, twigs and probably the occasional branch hit our garage and roof and my fish tried to escape from the tank. My husband reported that the upstairs windows were bending and shaking under the force of the wind. We lost power fairly early that night.
Thursday morning came as a relief and whilst walking down Yorkeys (I live at Yorkeys Knob, go on, chuckle, you know you want to...) main street, there were trees down and debris just everywhere. The 50k signpost was still upright, but the actual sign was at the bottom of the pole and facing the wrong way. The sea was just incredible. We never get surf up here and it was pounding up the beach. Or, at least, what was left of it.
Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come for us. The ensuing thunderstorm that parked above us for Thursday afternoon and night was incredible. 10.5 inches of rain in 24 hours, most of which fell in a 6 hour period. We had most of our neighbours out helping us in the pouring rain with the wheely bins trying to move the water on that was threatening to flood our house.
It was ironic really, that as we were trying to save the ground floor from flooding, that the roof decided that it couldn't cope and I went upstairs to discover a small river pouring from our lightfittings in the spare room. Onto the spare bed. Onto the carpet. And, as it turns out, through the roof, through the walls, through the built-in wardrobe, through the window casement and through our downstairs ceiling. Bugger.
Now we just sit and wait for the insurance assessors, the electrician to tell us that we can turn our lights and fans back on and use our upstairs power points, the builder to tell us what needs to be done to fix our rapidly mouldy house.
I will say one thing. We were really bloody lucky. We have a roof, we have walls, we have a house (albeit rapidly mouldy one). If cyclone Yasi had come where it was intially forecast we most likely would not have anything right now. I'm so glad that we do, and I feel so desperately sorry for those so near to us that now have nothing.
