Cyclone Debbie has damaged thousands of north Queensland properties, leaving some residents homeless in communities that face days without power after being cut off by floodwaters.
The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said the scale of Tuesday’s disaster was “significant” and it would take months for the communities worst hit by the category-four cyclone to recover.
Flooding was hampering recovery efforts after what the Bureau of Meteorology described as “phenomenal” rain of a metre in over just two days in the Mackay region.
The towns of Airlie Beach, Bowen, Proserpine were all cut off by floodwaters after bearing the brunt of the storm, which hit the Queensland coast about midday on Tuesday.
Homes and businesses lost their roofs as far inland as Collinsville, while dozens of vessels lay wrecked at Airlie Beach’s harbour.
There were no reported deaths and few injuries in the cyclone, which blew winds of up to 263km/h in the Whitsunday Islands and about 160km/h on the mainland.
West of Mackay, the overflowing Kinchant and Middle Creek dams prompted authorities at ask residents to evacuate on Wednesday afternoon. The request followed evacuation advice given to 25,000 residents in low-lying Mackay suburbs before Debbie struck.
The soaking from the south-bound rain system also prompted flood warnings in the state’s heavily populated south-east, as well as in Bundaberg, where residents were warned to stock up on food in case the town was cut off.
While police and local authorities said damage was not as severe as feared before the cyclone, Palaszczuk said inspections of areas including Proserpine were likely to reveal widespread devastation and recovery efforts would take months.
“The scale of the disaster is significant and there is a lot of work ahead of us to repair damage and help people put their lives back together,” she said.
Palaszczuk said the experience of those in the path of the cyclone “would have been horrific, and thankfully there has been no loss of life”.
She pledged $1m from the state to charities to help residents who “face a long road ahead to get back on their feet” and appealed for the public to donate.
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the federal opposition leader, Bill Shorten, were poised to inspect the damage on Thursday.
A military ship loaded in Brisbane with engineering equipment and humanitarian stores would head to the Whitsundays on Wednesday evening, said the state recovery coordinator, Brigadier Christopher Field.
Severe damage was reported in the Whitsunday Islands – resort destinations that help bring in $700m in tourist spending to the region.
Military helicopters were preparing to airlift guests from Daydream Island, where drinking water was running low, while police were helping about 4,000 people evacuate Hamilton Island.
More than 63,000 businesses and homes in the region were without power, with no prospect of the network being restored for days with Ergon Energy crews unable to get through the flooded highway north of Bowen.
The Insurance Council of Australia, which has declared the event a “catastrophe”, said insurers had received 2,000 claims but it was “much to early” to estimate total losses.
An Airlie Beach resident, Juliane Kasiske, told of fleeing to take refuge with a neighbour as winds that sounded like “the turbines of a jet” wrecked her house.
“As it got really bad, we heard the windows pop, and we felt the pressure on our ears,” Kasiske told the ABC. “There was just a big bang, the wind came through the garage here and popped the back windows as well, all the doors popped out.
“It was like a big jet sound, like the turbines of a jet, it was just so noisy.”
In Collinsville, the mining town struck by its first category-two cyclone after Debbie crossed inland, residents reported the loss of roofs from houses, the town’s Central Hotel and its supermarket.
“The sheets of tin are coming off my roof and as each one comes off it loosens the next one,” one wrote on Facebook. “What am I suppose to do?
“A rope over it would definitely help but it’s a 2 story house so we can’t get to it. At what stage do we try to call someone for help?”
A Whitsunday regional councillor, Mike Brunker, who is originally from Collinsville, said the town’s houses were “not built to [cyclone] standard” and Debbie could have come as a real shock to locals.
“A lot of old houses, I think there’s a lot of roof damage,” he said.
Bowen’s State Emergency Service controller, David Thicker, said a handful of homes had lost their roofs in town, where the worst fears about it being wiped out weren’t realised.
But people living in damaged older homes that contain asbestos, including renter Joel Medil, had been told they cannot return.
“As far structural damage goes, I think we dodged a bullet,” Brunker said of Bowen. “But environmental damage as bad as anything we’ve ever seen.”
Residents flocked to the local supermarket to stock up on supplies amid uncertainty about when road access in to the town would be restored.
Palaszczuk arrived by military helicopter on Wednesday afternoon to inspect Bowen, which army trucks had reached that morning. She said the recovery effort would see the government standing “with the families of the Whitsunday region for many, many days and weeks and months to come”.
The premier was later due to inspect Proserpine, which was hammered by the most severe wind gusts from Debbie on the mainland.
The Queensland Fire and Emergency Services deputy commissioner Mark Roche said the State Emergency Service had received more than 1,000 requests for help.
Roche thanked the community for heeding calls by authorities to take shelter by placing themselves “in safe locations”.
The discovery of two cars in floodwaters on the Bruce Highway near Proserpine sparked a search by police for their owners. Emergency crews were also trying to rescue three stranded people on the roof of a car submerged in floodwaters in Sarina, further south.
An Ergon Energy spokesman, John Fowler, said it would probably take several days for power to be restored to the region.
Helicopters flew from Townsville to do aerial inspection of network damage but repair crews in trucks could not pass the flooded highway north of Bowen.
“That’s our number one problem – access – at the moment,” Fowler said. “We can’t get in to restore the power.
“And once we get there, we really have to see the extent of damage. Getting the power back on is not a matter of just flicking a switch. It’s a very staged process to make sure it’s done safely for our customers and certainly for our staff.”
The cyclone is expected to cause losses for on the region’s $450m-a-year horticulture sector and its $850m-a-year sugar cane sector but industry bodies are yet to calculate the total damage.
The last comparable cyclone in north Queensland, Yasi in 2011, led to insured losses alone of $1.4bn, according to the Insurance Council.
