Unpacking the Yasi hype

* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional.  Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin “storm chaser” enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy.  It’s a keen amateur perspective on a frightening weather event but well worth reading in my opinion.

Cyclone Yasi was a big and scarey storm system.  Media and politicians continue to refer to it as a Category 5 cyclone with winds nearing 300 kmh near its centre, the largest cyclone ever to hit a populated area in Australia.  But is that really true?  A fairly obscure story on Australian Geographic website points out that “the full force may never be known because there are no gauges where the monster storm made landfall” and an engineer interviewed on last Friday’s 7:30 Report suggested that available data indicated Yasi was probably a small to medium Category 4 system with winds a bit over 200 kmh.  But that’s just about the full extent of any questioning of Yasi’s actual strength and destructive force.  What does the evidence actually tell us?

Don’t get me wrong; it did seem like it was going to be a very large event and government authorities were well justified in taking the steps they did to encourage residents to take it very seriously.  Looking at the Bureau of Meteorology site and at the radar images you could see this was a very nasty storm that was going to hit the coast.  Moreover, even if it WAS “only” a small-medium Category 4 cyclone that’s still a very large storm with frightening and lethal destructive force.

A number of observations sites did register very high wind readings (Lucinda Point 185km/h) and some stopped working after the main part of the storm hit them.  What we are unable to see from these observations is the estimated wind speed of 290 to 300 kilometres per hour.  How is the Bureau of Meteorology estimating these wind speeds?  If you look at the observations for Finders Reef, less than 90km south of the cyclone at 11.30 pm the night of the cyclone we see wind gusts to 109km/h but the Bureau of Meteorology and the US navy weather site was showing a estimated wind speed of 125knt or about 230km/h for the similar location.  If these higher wind speeds are correct then why are the ground stations getting the wind speed so wrong? Should we be relying on these ground stations for information?

“US Navy Weather site”: http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/tc_pages/tc_home.html

“Flinders Reef” Bureau of Meteorology Observations

“Lucinda Point” Bureau of Meteorology Observations

Maximum Recorded wind speed 185km/h at Lucinda Point

However, we need to be a little careful here.  Lucinda Point is around 80 kilometres as the crow flies from Mission Beach where apparently the centre of Yasi’s eye made landfall, and maximum wind speeds tend to drop off quite rapidly as one moves away from the centre of a cyclone.  In a typical cyclone maximum wind speeds are experienced within about 20 kilometres of the edge of the eye.  Yasi’s eye was apparently about 80 kilometres in diameter and so we would expect Lucinda to be just outside the area where maximum wind speeds were experienced.  Thus this reading does suggest that Yasi was a Category 4 system, and quite possibly a significant one with destructive wind gusts well into the 200 km/h plus zone.

The physical evidence of destruction in the path of this cyclone is also interesting as most of the damage does not appear to support the 300 km/h estimated wind speeds quoted by the Bureau of Meteorology and media.
If you look at images of the destruction of Darwin after cyclone Tracy (a large category 4 cyclone as stated by the Bureau of Meteorology) you will see not only 80% of all buildings destroyed but the total lack of vegetation left in its path.  You might explain the discrepancy between Tracy and Yasi in terms of destruction of the built environment by the fact that Building Codes are so much more rigorous today than they were in 1974, but it seems highly unlikely that they’re growing trees more cyclone-hardy than they were 36 years ago. This is not just trees stripped of their leaves but the trees no longer there and the almost total destruction of all utilities for a city of 40,000 people at that time.

(Tropical Cyclone Tracy is arguably the most significant tropical cyclone in Australia’s history to hit a significant populated area.  It accounted for 65 lives, the destruction of most of Darwin and profoundly affected the Australian perspective to the tropical cyclone threat.

The media has played this current cyclone up so much that is almost impossible to get a true picture of what has happened. The media statements like “the destruction was like an atomic bomb” is so incorrect, go to Hiroshima and have a look at the museum and look at the images, Cyclone Yasi was nothing like an atomic bomb. Go to the Darwin museum and have a look at the Tracy exhibition, look at the videos of people and the destruction after Cyclone Tracy and see the total despair that cyclone brought to Darwin.

If we are to believe the media hype Cyclone Yasi was and is a category 5 severe storm that has wreaked havoc from as far north as Port Douglas and south to Mackay when in fact Dunk Island through to Tully experienced the full force of this cyclone and came out with building, trees and water damage on a scale far less than that of Tracy, and certainly not the enormous loss of life that the media was predicting only the night before.
To leave the impression that much of North Queensland’s coast experienced a category 5 cyclone is incorrect and belittles the people of Dunk Island, Mission Beach and the Tully region that lived through this storm.
I feel for the people that have gone through this event and fear for their safety should an actual category 5 cyclone hit.  After reading an article on the web from someone that was in Tully the night of the cyclone and his statement of 300km/h winds I have to wonder, I am sure it felt like 300km/h winds to him but is this scientific data that can be relied on?

As someone that lives in Tropical Australia and every year face the cyclone season it would be good to have true and accurate information from the Bureau of Meteorology and not the hype of the media to make informed decisions about your own safety. It would be good to find out exactly how the Bureau of Meteorology predicts the wind speed for these events and what place the ground observation stations play in this. Can we rely on the Bureau of Meteorology for true and accurate forecasting of these extreme weather conditions or are they simply too underfunded to do this job with any accuracy and allow the media to take control?   As someone has said the Bureau of Meteorology is usually 100% correct for yesterday’s weather so will they now correct history and tell Australia what the actual wind speed and the true category rating of Cyclone Yasi?


About Ken Parish


22 Responses to Unpacking the Yasi hype

  1. KS says:


    Are you sure this is correct as Flinders Reef on the BOM radar appears some 230km east of Mission Beach, which would make it approximately 200km east of the cyclone eye at 11.30pm? The NE wind direction at Flinders would also correlate with this, although I’m confused as to why the wind at Lucinda should be NW at a time when it was 80km almost directly south of the eye?

    I’m a Cairns resident who was safely absent in NSW observing the cyclones progress towards my home, which was evacuated. The cyclone eye appeared to be clearly visible on the radar and passed between Flinders and Holmes Reefs much earlier in the day. The eye appeared on the rain radar as about 50km diameter as it approached the coast although that may be not a scientifically valid measurement technique! The leading edge of the eye appeared to hit the coast at Bingil Bay within minutes of midnight.

    Always best to be on the north side of a cyclone, on the east coast at least, which is why Cairns has been lucky with both Yasi and Larry. Thanks for an interesting post.

  2. Ken Parish says:


    I wonder if Ken G has a larger screen grab of the Flinders reef figures? You’re obviously quite right that Yasi would have been adjacent to Flinders Reef much earlier in the evening than 11:30pm and you would expect the wind gust numbers to be much higher at that time. That this was almost certainly the case is shown even by the figures that are visible on Ken G’s screen grab i.e. at 9:30pm wind gusts there were slightly stronger at 115 km/h. Given that Yasi was moving south-west at around 30 km/h until shortly before it made landfall, a rough estimate would be that it would have been adjacent to Flinders Reef at around 4-5pm. I wonder what the maximum wind gusts were at that time? If they were around 180 km/h or so (as I suspect), that would confirm the Lucinda figure Ken mentions and therefore suggest maximum gusts near the centre in the low-mid 200s.

    Unfortunately BOM seems now to have removed the detailed figures for 2 and 3 February from its website, so we can only hope Ken or someone else still has a more extensive screen grab

  3. Tortfeaser says:

    There’s certainly a story in this about the media being less helpful and more sensationalist than desirable, but this is a pretty poor article.

    Kenny G hasn’t given any thought to whether instruments can be reliable at wind speeds greater than 200km/h (and if they’re going to be robust enough to deal with those speeds, you’d think their accuracy at low speeds is going to be limited), discounting the possibility that their may not be accurate records available. The BoM doppler radar was giving the Cat 5 cyclone speeds, but when that site (Willis Island) fell over as the cyclone passed no anemometer data were available.

    Kenny also seems pretty happy to discount the physical evidence and hasn’t compared different vegetation types Darwin/Tully Heads, different housing densities, nor compared damage for pre/post 1975 construction in the same place.

    By all media accounts, damage for TC Yasi has been much greater than for TC Larry, and both cyclones impacted very similar regions relatively close together. TC Larry was a Cat 4 event, where does that leave the categorisation for Yasi?

  4. Blair says:

    Most of the time, cyclone intensity is estimated from satellite data – after all, most of the time they are over the ocean. This uses empirical relationships between satellite cloud properties, central pressure and winds in the eyewall, which are mostly derived from aircraft data in the North Atlantic (where they routinely fly Air Force planes into hurricanes to drop instruments) and Northwest Pacific, plus the fairly small number of cyclones where there are reliable surface data from the centre for both pressure and wind speed.

    For Yasi, there are no reliable wind speed measurements for the eyewall – places like Lucinda Point and Flinders Reef are too far away – but there are two pressure measurements from the Tully area of 929 and 930 hectopascals (one from a Queensland government site, one from a private observer), which are entirely consistent with something around the category 4/category 5 boundary.

  5. Jacques Chester says:

    When STC Monica struck Arnhem land, it left a trail of visible deforestation. I’m relieved that Yasi turned out not to be as destructive as feared — but like Ken I look at the aftermath and wonder at the lack of arboreal destruction.

  6. Ken Parish says:

    Hi Blair

    Yes I was just looking at the atmospheric pressure issue too as a proxy to get a guide to likely strength. The northern hemisphere Saffir-Simpson scale defines a Category 5 system in part as one with pressures less than 920 hectopascals. As far as I can see Australia’s system doesn’t mention pressure as such but the Saffir-Simpson scale defines wind speed range for category 5 similarly to the Australian standard so it seems reasonable for us to use the same measure. As I said, the detailed data from last week no longer seem to be available on the BOM site. However if it was 930 hectopascals in Tully (essentially just about exactly where the eye hit) that would indeed suggest it was a big category 4 (like TC Tracy) with maximum wind gusts probably around 250km/h. As Tortfeasor seems to suggest, the discrepancy with tree damage might be accounted for by the fact that Tully/Mission Beach etc is in the wet tropics whereas Darwin is dry/monsoonal (or would be but for suburban irrigation). Thus the typical type of foliage may be quite different.

    Nevertheless I think all these things are worth examining closely. Even if maximum gusts were around 250 km/h rather than 300 km/h (a bit bigger than Larry and about the same strength as Tracy though geographically more widespread) I reckon it’s important for local residents to know this so they can make properly informed decisions whether to evacuate next time north Queensland is threatened by a really big storm system. Given that global warming suggests extreme weather events will increase in frequency and intensity over time, the prospects of another huge storm occurring there in the foreseeable future are very significant.

    Personally I would not stay in a house engineered to category 4 if I had a viable choice and knew that a category 5 storm was in the offing. In fact I don’t even have to be hypothetical about it. Our house in Darwin IS engineered to category 4 standard and there was a point in the approach of Cyclone Monica in 2006 (a category 5 system) where BOM was reporting Darwin was within the predicted range of likely paths. Our family decamped to a CBD hotel for the duration, a decision I would take again if a similar situation occurred again.

  7. Davo says:

    Cyclone wind speeds are estimated using the Dvorak technique from satellite imagery. NOAA estimated the highest wind speed at 127 kt and the UW-CIMSS put it at between 125 and 140kt depending on the model parameters. All of these are high enough to get into category 5 (107kt). I would assume that the BoM would have done the same analysis and came up with the same result.

  8. Blair says:

    It gets a bit confusing for a couple of reasons. One is that the Saffir-Simpson scale the Americans use doesn’t line up with the Australian scale, mainly because the Saffir-Simpson scale is effectively a 6-category scale (tropical storm, plus category 1-5 hurricanes); hence something at the bottom of the category 5 range in Australia is a high-end 4 in the Saffir-Simpson system.

    The other confusion is about how winds are described. Peak gusts are easy enough but another indicator is ‘maximum sustained winds’. For this the Americans use a 1-minute average, most other places use a 10-minute average. The 1-minute maximum sustained winds are, on average, about 12% higher than the 10-minute. I’m assuming the numbers Davo’s quoting (given the source) are 1-minute, which converts to something around 110-115 kt for a 10-minute average, and in turn to 150-160 kt (275-290 km/h) for maximum gusts (usually about 40% higher than the maximum sustained 10-minute wind).

    Davo’s right that the Bureau would be basing its analysis principally on the Dvorak technique. There’s a margin of uncertainty there, partly in the analysis itself, partly in how that is then converted to winds and central pressure, so it’s not difficult to imagine that the best estimate of intensity could be out by +/- 10% or thereabouts.

    Assuming the same thing happens this time as after Larry, I would expect there will be a detailed damage survey after the event to try to estimate likely wind speeds on the ground. Road signs are particularly good for this sort of work because they’re standardised and amenable to wind tunnel testing.

  9. Kevin Rennie says:

    Cyclone Monica did hit a populated area. It was the indigenous community of Maningrida. For some reason it is a blind spot when the media talk about Oz cyclones. Still the strongest!

    Monica ‘I’ witness.

  10. Ken Parish says:

    Hi Kevin

    Apparently the eye of Monica crossed about 35km west of Maningrida itself but that would certainly still have meant that its residents were subjected to maximum wind gusts. It must have been very scarey. However it’s probably a good comparative gauge for Yasi. Damage to buildings in Maningrida appears to have been significant but nowhere near as great as Tracy i.e. not unlike what we see now at Mission Beach, Tully Heads etc. Fairly clearly much of the explanation is a vastly superior Building Code than in 1974. How would you assess the damage comparative to Maningrida in 2006, at least as far as can be judged from photos etc of Tully etc at present?

  11. Blair says:

    Actually, Maningrida was too far away for the peak winds from Monica (a much smaller system than Yasi was) – the highest gust there was 148 km/h (from http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/history/monica.shtml), although I’m not sure exactly where the instruments are relative to the community, in a situation where 5km could make a big difference.

    The destruction of vegetation at Monica’s landfall point, though, was truly spectacular.

  12. Barry says:

    As someone who went through Tracy may I offer some observations. The Tracy photo you show is, I would guess, of a new suburb where trees were not yet established. Not an indication of tree obliteration. I think leaves blowing off the trees is a good indicator of wind strength, but there needs to be some study of the relative strengths of sclerophyll trees vs. rain-forest trees. A most impressive indication from Tracy was the lamp poles (I think they were), probably 5 to 8 cm diameter steel pipes, gracefully bent over into C-shapes still sticking into the ground, with no evidence of impact from a hard object. one after another of them, in rows.

  13. rog says:

    There seems to be too much dependence on the rather simple wind instruments used. Years ago I was involved in a yacht race that was hit by an intense low (TC Lance)off the east coast. The rescue helicopter told me that at times they had to apply full throttle just to maintain position over the yachts – something like +80 knots – yet the BOM maintained that the wind was gusting to 60 knots. Later on I talked to the lighthouse and asked them why the wind speeds were lower that actual, they replied that was the last recording before the instrument blew up.

  14. Mark Textor says:

    A very interesting piece. I remember the trees stripped bare that morning. In fact its one of my most vivid memories of Tracy. Thanks for posting. Mark Textor

  15. Ken Parish says:

    Nice to see you at Troppo Mark. Give my regards to your brother next time you’re talking. Is he going to restart blogging one day? There’s been nothing on Wacking Day since 2009.

  16. Russell Moore says:

    I was with the NSW SES at Cardwell, and I must say I was surprised at how well the buildings survived the cyclone.

    One house that directly faced the beach, and had a tile roof, (admittedly every tile was wired down), only had about 10% of its tiles displaced. This house also had two roof mounted evaporative air conditioners, and only one had moved out of position. Quite a few buildings appeared to have little, no damage at all. One house we went to which just had a nailed down metal roof had about 35% of its roof peeled back, and folded over. I would have expected total roof removal at cat’ 5 wind speeds.

    Also I would guess that about 40% of the towns trees are still standing, and almost 100% of the bushland trees are stripped bare of leaves, in fact it looked like a fire had swept through. Maybe this is how the local trees survive cyclones , most are only small to medium sized. If Cardwell had experienced a cat’ 5 I would have expected a lot more damage to buildings and more trees smashed or knocked down. RM

  17. Scythrops Novaehollandiae says:

    I am posting my question here as I have pretty much exhausted all
    the sources of information on TC Yasi available in searching the Net.
    I include Usenet in that sweep. None of the “social networks”
    have been considered, at all.
    My choosing the CT page to post to is based on the lead article, and
    the follow up dialogue, as being the closest to what I know to be the
    actual case for TC Yasi as at 1030AM on the 2nd of February 2011.
    Assistance in getting the information I seek will be most
    appreciated. One to one comms can be made using
    Remove the obvious to get there.

    Greatly concerned, I rang B0M in Melbourne (03) 9669 4054)
    at 9AM on the 2/2/11 as the data from the Willis Met. site
    and the SLP charts
    were not giving me anything like the picture the output of the
    TC Warning advices (for the previous 24 hours) had been building.
    As I recall TC Yasi’s Sou’West quadrant (eye) at that time was some
    50klms from Willis and running down straight onto Willis with a CP of
    930+hPa and a MWS of 85-90 knots.
    [The page had lost the klm/hr outputs
    just after the radar went down at 8AM that morning]
    I explained what I had found (previous 30+ hours)and asked the
    very helpful officer to explain the anomaly for this supposedly
    Cat#5 System.
    That guy passed the question around the office, I could hear
    the questions being asked as the others in the office bought
    Willis up and obviously saw the screen output.
    Nobody there could explain the anomaly.
    I was passed onto a “Scientist” for an answer.
    That person too had no answer other than suggesting I go read
    a relevant work – http://www.worldscibooks.com/environsci/7597.html
    At 444 pages I am now quite convinced pushing the question
    was the best action on the day. My personal situation demanded
    prompt action as the Govt. had ordered “mandatory evacuation”
    for the immediate area I was concerned for, our home.
    On pressing for an explanation, I was told, and I quote directly;
    “This is our job, we are paid to deliver these advices and we know
    what we are doing. You will just have to take a leap of faith in
    trusting us, or, ask yourself are you prepared to live with the
    outcomes IF you are wrong in using that data to make a decision”.
    We had been lifting machinery and possessions to high places and
    tying down movable objects since Sunday afternoon. With no answer
    being the answer we decided to hightail it out of there before
    the roads closed. That night we sat on a verandah and watched
    TC Yasi move through, with no greater than 80 knot gusts. At that
    location a Cat#3 storm was being touted. You do not sit outside
    in a Cat#3 storm.
    As with a number of other cyclones endured I was under the bed
    for the few hours before the full force of TC Althea came upon us.
    Seeing the damage already apparent, during the eye we moved
    every mattress in the place to the shed on the property, closed
    and bolstered the doors, huddling through the remainder when it came.
    TC Althea was a Cat#3, in this new fangled “dumbed down” version of
    storm rating.

    On the morning of 5/2/11 I again rang B0M (Melb.) and asked if
    they would pass the log on Willis Met. for the previous 72 hours up
    until 11AM on the Wednesday, when Willis went “off-line”.
    No problem there, the guy said he would get it and pass it on.
    I am not going to detail the events between then and now, here.
    The current status of that request is this – B0M (QLD) is refusing
    to hand over the log. Information that is/was “public domain”.
    B0M (QLD) has stated they will make a press release but no
    data is being released at my request.

    I am now asking myself “Why is that?”. Why is this information
    now become “Classified”.
    My question for any reader who has survived the text trip thus
    far is — What do I do to discover why the information will
    not be handed over?

    I am now kicking myself rather soundly I did not take
    screen-dumps as the information updated. I excuse that by
    telling myself it was a busy time.
    Why I am now pursuing this rather vigorously is for those
    who come after us, those who will hear (anecdotally) what a
    Cat#5 storm is like to endure, and what they will then do
    to prepare themselves.
    That worries me.. because in a true [email protected] impact they are going
    to die, or be severely injured.
    TC Yasi was (at best) a medium Cat#3 storm outside of the 30K
    “zone” around the core. At it’s core a Cat#4 at best, a low Cat#4.
    True, in topographical area it was the largest yet, but that is
    only relevant to the area the damage inflicted covered. A factor
    we hear about every day as multiple communities deal with the
    same scale of cleanup.

    For the record?
    As best as I recall, at 10AM on Wednesday 2nd February 2011
    TC Yasi crossed onto Willis Isle with CP of 937hPa and a MWS
    recording of 100 knots. The relevant changes in temperature
    and humidity were present, as was the rainfall ceasing.
    The site then recorded three instances of “CALM” followed
    by at least four entries which were hyphenated (blank).
    The page then fell over and a graphic was put up.
    “No data available”. Subsequently the “no data for the
    past 72 hours” resided up until the 18th of Feb/2011 when
    the page was reinstated.

    So far I have found just one person who was watching that
    B0M page that morning. He “flicked off” after the radar
    fell over, noting a MWS display of 185km/h. Although he
    too is “anonymous” I am inclined to take his observation
    as legit as it corresponds directly with what I know.

    Two people watching Willis Met. station data updating in
    real time?
    It simply cannot be, not with ALL of Queensland and a greater
    part of Australia being told the night before “the worst cyclone
    in living memory is upon us, North Queensland… you are
    on your own”.
    This at 10PM Tuesday night and the eye of TC Yasi aimed
    straight at Willis Isle, the earliest weather warning station
    Queenland possesses.
    Just cannot be.. but without that log of Willis’ Met. data all
    of my post can be just written off as “constructed invective”.

    What do I do to discover why the information will
    not be handed over?
    Please, somebody…
    Storm Bird

  18. Kevin Rainbow says:

    Argue all you like with statistics and graphs etc, but, serving aboard HMAS Arrow in Darwin Harbour during Cyclone Tracy, all I know is our wind speed equipment failed at 260KPH, before the most severest of the storm hit us, and subsequently sunk us. So as far as I’m concerned, Cyclone Tracy will always rate as a severe catagory 5 system, and none of the so called scientific garbage will convince me otherwise. Being there is all thats needed.

    • Judy Wilson says:

      Kevin, I’m a 1968 Cav Rd graduate, and I think you were in 12 B. Our year group is having a 45-year reunion at Holland Park this Saturday 16 November 2013. Could you please reply to let us connect with you again? Five years ago we did a big search for everyone for our big 40th reunion, but sadly we couldn’t locate you – there were over 100 from our year on that night. This time there’ll be around 40 attending. Hoping to hear from you, Judy Wilson (nee Elsner).

    • Scythrops Novaehollandiae says:

      >Kevin Rainbow on April 4, 2012 at 7:18 pm said:
      > So as far as I’m concerned, Cyclone Tracy will always rate
      >as a severe catagory 5 system, and none of the so called
      >scientific garbage will convince me otherwise.

      As sorrowful as it is you lost your ship Kevin there is no correlation
      shared in respect of the effects of a Cat5 blow on terra firma
      infrastructure. Likewise for the sheer demolition of much of
      Darwin residential, buildings largely thrown up with a wet thumb
      into the wind and “she’ll be right mate” as the staples were shot
      into the roof truss.
      Nobody is going to challenge TC Tracy as the most severe system to cross our coastline in living memory, however there
      is no reliable scientific data to learn from, surely the significant
      point of Ken Parish’s post?
      Other posts here on UTYH topics also lament the absence of any
      science, “garbage” or otherwise.
      My contribution points to the refusal to supply what was available,
      clearly logged by BOM. As a reasonable conclusion that
      refusal could be motivated from a read of the data proving the
      extrapolation of the science denies the hype, hype built with an
      ambition to garner disaster funding.
      So here we are 37 years post Tracy with a score of storm events
      since, and a Yasi to boot, and still there is no collective
      coastal data grid/network for Northern Australia as a means to
      gather the science. So it seems we are left to record only those
      emotions of anecdotal opinion, all biased by each owned experience of what constitutes a “cyclone”..and therein lies
      the rub.

      >Being there is all thats needed.
      And the starkness of it shocked you Kevin?
      Not just leafless trees, as in Winifred/Larry/Yasi, but
      NO BLOODY TREES… for miles and miles!
      And in Town those giants that had stood for hundreds of years
      uprooted and smashed into buildings that may have withstood if
      100ton of timber had not smashed into them!
      Who can forget the 10′ sheet of roofing iron buried a foot into the
      trunk of an old eucalypt, a ‘flag’ 30′ off the ground? Standing there
      on the side of the Stuart Highway just begging for a wag to scale
      the height to paint – “WELCOME TO what was DARWIN”!

      Sorry Kevin “being there” will not build ships capable of
      withstanding Cat5 at anchor, neither will anecdotal subjective
      values build improvements in warning and recording systems.
      What “being there” will build is a heightened sense of impending
      disaster for some, yet for others it will now be “oh I did Yasi
      and yeah, scary, but no big deal really”… and that Kevin is
      how science deniers will perish. At least they will not be able
      to post about the experience afterwards, yeah?

      As an update to my earlier post (February 26, 2011) I am yet to
      receive any acknowledgement from any other user of the
      BOM Willis Isle site on 2nd of Feb. 2011.
      Also none of my endeavours to get BOM to cough with those
      logs has borne fruit. At all levels the door just slammed
      shut – why, remains my question.

      Storm Bird

    • D Slater says:

      I couldn’t agree more! Now all that’s left to do is to have the “unofficial” death finally known..! Have written a book about our experiences during and after Tracy. If you’d like a copy Kevin, email me, or post your contact details to PO Box 1097, Warwick Qld 4370.

    • D Slater says:

      My comment “I couldn’t agree more…” was in relation to (and in full support of), Kev Rainbow’s comments. Love your YouTube work Kev..! Keep up the good work.

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