I have to admit that when I first saw the images of the destruction at Pardoo Roadhouse today, wrought by Cyclone Ilsa, it brought back some memories. And a little bit of anger. And a few tears for those that went through it and now suffering the consequences.
You see, I experienced Cyclone Joan in Port Hedland in 1975, a year after Cyclone Tracy walloped Darwin with such devastation effect.
My Dad worked at the Main Roads Department, and we had a typical “state house” in South Hedland – all fibro and lino with cane furniture and no air-conditioning. These houses were placed in “cells” and each cell (as I recall as it was nearly 50 years ago) had 5 or 6 houses around a communal grassed area. These houses had their back doors facing the streets and the front of the house faced inward towards this central area.
The rooms all had louvred walls into the main living area and ceiling fans were the order of the day.
This was in contrast to those folk and their families who worked for the mining companies at the time – Mt Newman Mining and Goldsworthy Mining. Before the days of FIFO, these companies went to great pains to make the lure of working in the Pilbara attractive with rent free (or minimal rent) brick residences, fully airconditioned and furnished.
The distance from South Hedland to the main town of Port Hedland is around 15Km via a single road that has a bridge over the railway line connecting the mine sites to the port facilities. Back then, facilities in South Hedland were poor in terms of shopping or entertainment. We had a small supermarket-cum-bottleshop and a service station as I recall, plus the High School and that was about it. All the main shops were in Port Hedland proper.
Not that we had a Coles or Woolworths. There was an Elders which had a supermarket and hardware store section, a National Bank (NAB), R&I (Bankwest) and ANZ bank, news agency, bakery and deli and a few other ancillary retail outlets.
As a 19-year-old, I worked at a company called Direct Engineering Service (DES) as a storekeeper / purchasing clerk / dogsbody. When we got the cyclone warning, nobody was overly worried despite the proximity to the Tracy disaster, and we just went about our business, calmly securing loose objects, tying things down, moving stuff inside and as a precaution, taping up windows.
When the Yellow alert came, we knew this was about to potentially become serious, so we also got in supplies at home to last a few days, still not really thinking anything nasty would actually happen.
At Red alert time, about 5pm as I recall, the wind started to pick up and we retreated indoors. By 11 o’clock, the noise of the wind was deafening. The entire house shook, and the rain was driving against the windows. Dad and I stepped outside for a peek, and the raindrops were liked bullets, horizontal ones. They bloody hurt and actually drew blood.
Then the power went off.
Twenty minutes later or so, a frantic banging on the front door had our neighbours clammering to get in. Their house had sustained damage and they were worried it was about to implode.
And I can see the funny side now, but water started to seep in under the doors and through the edges of the windows.
Funny, because as I said, a standard state house had lino on the floors, but my Dad had purchased second hand carpet tiles from the now defunct Cooke Point Recreation Club, and although they had been cleaned, all the soap had apparently not been removed and so over the next hour or so, gradually our lounge room filled up with soap suds!
We had no lights apart from a few torches and candles (that kept getting blown out as no matter what you did, you could not keep the wind out totally), and so there was nothing to do but wait it out with some beers from an Esky filled with ice, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red for amusement.
I think we must have slept in lounge chairs and on the settee for a bit on and off, but the noise was indescribable and unrelenting. A combination of howling wind with gusts up to 208 kph (as we found out later) and the rain on the colour bond roof was deafening and made it difficult to sleep. There were also other noises – pieces of roofing hitting things as it flew the air, assorted bangs and clangs from unknown objects colliding with our garage and goodness knows what else.
It seemed to go on forever.
In all, we sat it out for, I think, about 6-7 hours.
Next morning, it was calm enough, but still windy but we could venture out and see what had happened. Oddly, the rain had stopped, and the sky was clear and blue.
My car had been sand blasted on one side with the garage containing my dad’s car protecting the other. The house itself was intact thankfully, apart from a few cracked sheets of fibro, although next door, belonging to our guests for the night, was a mess, scattered all over their part of the cell.
A really weird casualty was our rotary clothesline. Despite being embedded into concrete and wound down to lock it, the wind had caught the horizontal vanes and the entire thing had screwed into the ground, so it was only 1 metre high!
THAT was the power of the wind. We also found a piece of paper embeded 1” into a piece of timber that was laying against the garage.
My younger brother worked at the Council and managed to beg, borrow, cajole or otherwise procure a generator that we placed in the communal area, and via a bunch of power boards laid extension cords to each of the houses in our “cell” thus at least letting us power our fridges.
We were the lucky ones. The main power came from a generator station towards the main Port, and all of the brand new power steel RSJ power poles were bent and twisted and the lines were down. Perversely, the original wooden poles that only recently had been decommissioned stayed up. Wood flexes, steel doesn’t.
I think off memory it took over 10 days to get power back to South Hedland.
The scariest thing I came across was via my workplace. Being an air conditioning company, we were tasked to go to Roebourne, 200Km south, to repair the air conditioning on the local hospital.
I was volunteered to go along with the senior foreman to drive there to recce the situation. About an hour out, we came across the Sherlock River bridge and the water, normally many metres below the bridge deck, was lapping at the top and flowing at a monstrous rate.
The foreman parked our panel van about 150 metres back, deciding to walk onto the deck to see how safe it was. Frankly, it felt like it could let go at any moment, so he decided it was way to unsafe to cross and we turned to walked back to the car. In that short time, the water had risen further, and now we had water, that was still rising, between us and the car,. That 150 metres took about 30 minutes to wade through and was probably the scariest moments of my life.
Gradually, everything came back to normal.
Thankfully, there were no reported casualties from Joan. Infrastructure damage to the townsite and port and outlying settlements was immense. Livestock losses were huge too, and flooding caused major road damage.
I do not regret going thought the experience; quite the contrary. It gave me a very hefty appreciation of the power of nature, and a monstrous respect for it.
But it also makes me angry when I see people seemingly flaunting what the danger is by going surfing for example, putting their lives at risk as well those poor bastards sworn to save them in times of peril.
Mother Nature is unforgiving. I have seen this, not just with Cyclone Joan, but other lesser cyclones I went through while living in the Kimberley and the Pilbara.
I am no climate scientist, but they are smarter than me, and if they say global warming is causing this stuff, it is obvious to me that we should all be doing our bit to minimise it where we can.
I don’t think any TV coverage can give a real indication of just how a cyclone feels at the time. Unlike an earthquake (which I have also been through) it is not immediate and over in seconds or minutes; it just goes on and on and on. And unlike a bushfire, there is nowhere to run to. You just have to sit it out.
In short, they are not fun at all. I don’t want to go through another. And don’t wish it on anyone else either.
Please, feel compassion for those poor folk at Pardoo Roadhouse. I understand they have setup a GoFundMe campaign so they can get back on their feet again. These locations are lifelines in the Pilbara and the Kimberley, not just a business. If you can help, please do.
Footnote: One thing I forgot to include when I wrote this originally. The folk at Pardoo managed to get messages out they were OK pretty much straight after the cyclone had passed, including photos etc. In 1975, TV had only just arrived and all we had was the ABC, the only radio station was the ABC and to call Perth via telephone cost $2-13 per 3 minutes. So with no power and all the lines down, we had no local radio, TV OR telephone. My workplace communicated back to base in Perth via long wave two radio, and this went on for weeks. Compare that to today.
Would you cope? No internet, email, messenger, SMS. Nothing.