Townsville recovering from ex-Cyclone Kirrily

Kristy Sexton-McGrath with more information from Townsville.

Transcript

00:00 It was certainly very windy down here this morning, but as the system moves off, things

00:07 seem to be calming down.

00:09 It certainly was an eventful night.

00:12 You can see behind me there, we've had a yacht washed up and it's not the only one.

00:16 There's around five or six that have washed up on the beach here on the Strand.

00:21 It's a very popular picnicking place for families and walkers.

00:25 A lot of trees down, a lot of branches, so local government authorities have a bit of

00:31 a job ahead of them in terms of the clean up here, particularly along the foreshore.

00:36 We haven't seen any major structural damage on buildings.

00:40 In the Townsville Seacourse, there's around another 8,000, 9,000 people that were without

00:45 power in the Burdekin region, just south.

00:48 There's also some power outages in the Whitsundays and even as far north as Cairns, 400 kilometres

00:54 away.

00:55 Thankfully, this system seems to have been more of a wind event than a rain event.

01:01 We only received a little bit of rain last night.

01:02 I think it was around 50 millimetres.

01:05 It might seem a lot to other regions, but when you're in the wet tropics, it's not that

01:09 much at all.

01:10 But obviously, as that system continues to track west to the areas of Richmond and Hewenden,

01:17 those alerts are in place and we could still see some flooding there.

01:21 Melissa.

01:22 And Christy, you've been out and about a bit this morning.

01:24 What have you been hearing from residents?

01:27 Well, Melissa, you know, North Queensland residents, they're a very relaxed bunch.

01:33 I've got quite the audience behind me taking photos at the moment.

01:37 They're certainly all down here on the Esplanade.

01:39 It is a public holiday.

01:41 So out and about taking photos.

01:43 The people that we've spoken to, it seems to be, you know, there's some people that

01:47 said, look, you know, the yard's a mess.

01:50 We've lost a fence or the roof's come off the shed.

01:53 But then there's others that seem to have escaped any sort of damage at all.

01:57 But look, Melissa, there is always a silver lining in these things.

02:01 And I met a fabulous man down here this morning, Jim.

02:06 And Jim dumped three mud crabs at my feet.

02:10 He had quite the cyclonic haul overnight and he was very, very happy to share them with

02:15 me and my fabulous cameraman, Olly.

02:18 Unfortunately, we just don't have the fridge space.

02:21 So hopefully Jim gets to enjoy some sweet chilli crab tonight.

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