Cyclone Yasi - Do I stay or do I go now?

Is it just me? Have I lived such a nomadic life in the last 10 years that packing up your loved ones & driving out of harms way seems like the logical course of action in such an epic instance of danger? “Nahhhhhhh she’ll be right, we’ll ride it out” Sit in your bathroom/toilet with your children crying out in terror for hours on end while a Category 5 tears at your house. Begs the question ARE YOU COMPLETELY *@$%ING BONKERS?!! Make like a backpacker AND LEAVE!

Get in your car and drive. As far South as needed to reach safety. (Mackay was recommended by the emergency services.) Come back tomorrow (or later) and do the clean up. Is it really so terrible to abandon your house and let it ride out the storm on it’s own? It is a house, after all. You can’t protect it. You can’t reassure it. You can’t cuddle it while it cries through the furious storm or try desperately to keep it safe and dry after it’s roof flies off in a screech of metal and broken glass. But you’ll need to do that for your children you have huddled under a mattress in the bathroom. To ask your children to endure an emotional, psychological and in all likelihood, physical trauma by staying in the path of a monster Category 5 cyclone with 300km/hour winds and a dangerous storm surge is pure insanity. By choosing also to simply relocate from your house to a local emergency shelter does little to remove them from that path of danger.

Survivors of Cyclone Tracy in 1974 are weighing in commenting on this question of stay or go. They say if you were unfortunate enough to go through Tracy you sure wouldn’t be squatting in the path of Yasi ‘bunkering down’. You’d get out of there.

I have friends saying “The people of Innisfail should be in everybody’s prayers tonight.”

My response was “The people of Innisfail should be in Mackay tonight!”

For those who stayed, may you and your family live to tell the tale and share your fear and new-found respect for mother nature. May your childrens’ fearful experience not traumatise them for life. May friends and neighbours rally together after this epic event to lighten the burden that follows. May you never again choose to stay, when you could go.

Our thoughts are with you.

JK