A severe tropical cyclone packing winds of up to 235kph battered a major oil and mining region of Western Australia on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents and the lock-down of key industries, officials said.
Emergency officials said torrential rains and a storm sea surge of up to 10m driven by Cyclone Glenda would bring widespread flooding to a region already soaked by weeks of storms.
Several hundred people evacuated low-lying areas around the massive oil and ore shipping hub of Karratha before authorities issued a ”red alert” early on Thursday and ordered remaining residents to take shelter rather than flee.
”The cyclone is basically very close and there are extreme winds and a lot of danger. If people haven’t evacuated by now, it’s probably too late,” said emergency services spokesperson Jim Cahill.
At 8am local time (12pm GMT), Glenda was classified as a severe category-four cyclone on a scale of five and was approaching the coast of the Pilbara region at a speed of 14kph, according to the Bureau of Meteorology website.
The cyclone was expected to hit land later on Thursday somewhere along a 300km stretch of coast between Karratha and Exmouth, a sparsely populated area about 1 200km north of the Western Australia capital of Perth.
While Glenda had weakened slightly as it approached the coast, officials warned it remained a very dangerous storm, nearly as powerful as Cyclone Larry, which devastated towns on Australia’s far north-eastern coast 10 days ago.
Neil Bennett of the Western Australia Tropical Cyclone Centre said Glenda was comparable in destructive power to Cyclone Bobby, which killed seven people in the Pilbara region in 1995.
”This is one of the biggest ones we’ve seen,” Bennett said, ”it’s a very dangerous cyclone”.
The Pilbara, Australia’s main iron ore producing region and site of major oil and natural gas reserves, lies in what is known as ”cyclone alley” because of the frequency of major storms that sweep in from the Indian Ocean each year.
Glenda is the sixth cyclone of the current season and residents of the rugged region say they know how to protect themselves.
”We should be pretty right, the town is built for the cyclones,” Erica Stephens, a Karratha resident who has lived in the Pilbara for 18 years, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
But she did admit ”everybody’s a little bit worried” about the force of Glenda.
Officials said they were particularly concerned over the danger of flooding, with Glenda’s surge coming when tides are already at their highest.
”Tides are likely to rise significantly above the normal high tide mark with very dangerous flooding and damaging waves,” the weather bureau said.
Mining and oil giants BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Santos and Woodside Petroleum shut down offshore rigs in the path of the storm and closed port operations in and around Karratha.
Woodside and Santos sent floating oil rigs from their big Cossack and Mutineer Exeter oilfields out to sea away from Glenda’s route.
BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto suspended all shipping of iron ore from its Pilbara mines, but were continuing mining operations.
”At this stage we are in full tie-down at the ports, which means basically we have sent all our ships out to sea and stopped all operations at the port,” a Rio Tinto spokesperson said. – AFP
