Qualla: Cyclone Yasi

Cyclone Yasi: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA/Aqua-MODIS, Public domain. It was 500 kilometres wide, with an eye 30 kilometres across, and it came ashore in the dark. Just after midnight on 3 February 2011, Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi crossed the north Queensland coast near Mission Beach as a Category 5 system, the most violent rating the scale allows. The record low pressure measured as the eye passed over Tully marked it as one of the most powerful cyclones in the state's recorded history. By dawn, towns that had stood for a century were unrecognisable. And yet, in the towns it tore apart, almost no one had died.

Read more: Cyclone Yasi on Qualla

Image: NASA/Aqua-MODIS | Public domain

Cyclone Yasi: A Storm Born Near Fiji

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia, CC BY 2.0. Yasi began far out in the Pacific, a tropical low that the Fiji Meteorological Service first noted southwest of Tuvalu in late January. It crossed the islands of Vanuatu, brushed the edges of the Solomons and Papua New Guinea, then entered the Australian region and began to inten...

Read more: Cyclone Yasi on Qualla

Image: Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Cyclone Yasi: The Coast Empties

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia, CC BY 2.0. Queensland had weeks of catastrophic flooding already behind it that summer, and the forecasters did not understate what was coming. Media called it possibly the worst cyclone in the state's history. Premier Anna Bligh urged the coast to flee, and it did. Thirty thousand people l...

Read more: Cyclone Yasi on Qualla

Image: Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Cyclone Yasi: The Night Itself

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia, CC BY 2.0. At Mission Beach, near the point of landfall, gusts were estimated around 290 kilometres an hour. By morning the beach had lost its sand and not a single structure was undamaged. Tully, where the eye's record pressure was logged, was described by its own residents as a scene of m...

Read more: Cyclone Yasi on Qualla

Image: Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Cyclone Yasi: The Reckoning, and the Mercy

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob and Stephanie Levy from Townsville, Australia, CC BY 2.0. Daylight revealed the scale of it. Around 170,000 homes lost power, some for more than a month. Townsville's water supply nearly ran dry. At least three quarters of the region's banana crop was gone, and the damage to the sugar cane was counted in the hundreds of millions; total ...

Read more: Cyclone Yasi on Qualla

Image: Rob and Stephanie Levy from Townsville, Australia | CC BY 2.0