00:01Gee, the tropics have been so, so wet and that's actually what's made Narelle for Queensland
00:08quite a problem because the ground is so soaking, trees have really been ready, I'm going to
00:13put my hood up because this is about to get really wet, trees have been ready to react
00:17quickly and to fall as well, like this one behind me.
00:20A lot of the trees up this way, there you go, there's a proper heavy rain band coming
00:25in behind Narelle there, yeah, trees like the one behind me are very, very shallow rooted
00:30and so we've seen a lot of those coming up around the town, there's debris across the
00:35roads, the entire town of Weeper is without power right now and you can see conditions
00:40are making things a little bit tricky for the recovery, we've had emergency management
00:44meeting this morning where the authorities are figuring out just exactly how long it's
00:49going to be before we can get power back on here in Weeper and to the communities around
00:54here that use Weeper's power, there is a lot of remote communities across the top of Queensland
01:02so we're just starting to get the first bits of information out, luckily Cohen seems to
01:07have avoided the worst of the potential damage and that seems to be the case for most of far
01:13northern Queensland, here in Weeper we've got reports and we've seen some trees down on
01:18buildings, on fences, that sort of thing, lots of debris around but I think for the most
01:23part we seem to have gotten away from the worst of it, although we've still got a little
01:28bit of wild weather and some heavy rainfall to come.
01:31Yeah, absolutely. Nate, if we can keep you out in the rain for just a little bit longer,
01:35just take us through where Cyclone Norell is heading now because obviously as you said,
01:43we've had our eyes on the Northern Territory for a couple of weeks now, that flooding in the
01:48Catherine area is really concerning, now we've got the whole sort of east coast on watch.
01:54Yeah, so the system is now in the Gulf of Carpentaria and it's intensifying. Some relative good news is
02:02that hasn't picked up more power as quickly as we maybe first thought and that's good because that
02:07ultimately means it won't get as strong as it could get by the time it reaches the Territory but it
02:12has
02:13also slowed down a little bit so we're now expecting a coastal crossing likely in the early hours of tomorrow
02:17morning. The problem with that is the longer it stays over the warm shallow waters of the Gulf of
02:22Carpentaria, the more chance there is of it intensifying further at the moment. We're expecting
02:26to see wind gusts around about 180 kilometres an hour as it makes landfall. We've had communities
02:31evacuated in parts of the east of the top end, so good news there for many. Now we'll keep a
02:37close
02:38eye on the situation through the day today because we're going to see that really start to deteriorate
02:43as we get into this afternoon but then that'll last through into tomorrow certainly and then we'll
02:49we'll probably see the system weakening relatively quickly back to a tropical low but you've got to
02:53remember and I know you know Mel because you're up you you're a tropical woman um the the tropical
02:59the strength of a cyclone only tells you about the wind speeds so once it becomes a tropical low again
03:05that means the winds will have died down but it's still carrying with it all this heavy rain and that's
03:10really the problem you know the last round of major flooding at Catherine was happening with
03:15only about 50 millimetres in the gauges. Bureau saying we're likely to see somewhere between 70
03:19and 130 over the course of tomorrow perhaps even more so Catherine, Daly River, all those communities
03:27that have been soaked for weeks now and have been dealing with flooding are about to get yet another
03:32burst from Norell and then there is a chance that we'll see the system popping back out into the
03:37Joseph Bonaparte Gulf uh to the north of WA and then maybe re-intensifying again so we could be
03:44talking about ex-tropical cyclone Norell and then tropical cyclone Norell once more later next week
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