Safety first as cyclones hit Australia

INCHEON, 20 February 2015 – The Mayor of one of the municipalities in UNISDR’s Making Cities Resilient campaign has been in the lead of preparedness efforts ahead of Cyclone Marcia which continues to lash Australia’s east coast and its hinterland.

A day ahead of the storm, the Mayor of Gold Coast city, Mr Tom Tate, was prominent in a major safety campaign urging citizens to take no unnecessary risks as Category 3 Tropical Cyclone Marcia unleashed heavy rains and 204kmh winds.

“Beaches remain closed: stay away as we are worried about the storm surge,” Mayor Tate told citizens of Australia’s sixth largest city with a population of over 500,000. “The key message I want to get out is now is the time to prepare. Look after yourself, your family, your neighbours, and don’t take risks.

“If it’s flooded turn around, forget it. Keep an eye on your kids especially those wishing to play in flood water and drains. One main message, please, even if they’re not your kids: Get them out!”

Powerlines have been cut and heavy structural damage is reported in and around two significant population centres, Yeppoon and Rockhampton. People have been told to stay indoors.

At the same time Cyclone Lam has been affecting parts of the Northern Territory, north-east of its capital city Darwin.

The State Premier of Queensland Annastacia Palaszczuk conducted her press conference with a sign language interpreter to ensure that hearing impaired or deaf people did not miss out on key safety messages and information. “We want everyone to be safe,” the Premier said explaining such that the expected level of the storm surge was expected to increase to 3 metres in some places.

Premier Palaszczuk reported that some evacuation centres were full but there was space in others. Evacuations had been launched to bring island communities and tourists – such as those on Lady Elliott Island on the Great Barrier Reef – to the mainland.

Cyclone Marcia has prompted discussion in the Australian media on the impact of climate change causing a southward shift of tropical cyclones. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Prof Steve Turton of James Cook University, in Queensland, says climate change is leading to an expansion of the tropics of 150-300km every 30 years.

“The research is suggesting that, in a warmer world, we'll get more intense cyclones because there'll be more energy in the oceans and also the atmosphere,” Prof Turton says in an interview with the Herald’s Environment Editor Peter Hannam.

At present, buildings are required to meet high wind speeds only from Caboolture near Brisbane and northwards, leaving much of the Queensland capital uncovered by the tighter structural rules, the Herald reports.

“I think they need to move that line down to Coffs Harbour (in northern New South Wales) this century [as part of] planning for a warmer world,” Professor Turton says.

Australia is one of the few countries in the world that has a national resilience strategy. The Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, has praised Australia for investing in better understanding of risk, gathering data and equipping people and organisations to better anticipate and decrease future losses.

In less than four weeks, countries from around the world will convene on Sendai, Japan, for the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction to adopt a post-2015 international framework, the successor to the Hyogo Framework for Action: 2005-2015 (HFA).

This ‘HFA Decade’ has been marked by some of the worst disasters on record, sharp reminders of why the world needs such an instrument in the first place.

In Australia alone there has been a series of severe disasters including: the Millennium Drought (2002-7); the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria and the 2013 bushfires in New South Wales; the 2010-11 floods Queensland, 2011 floods in Victoria, and further major inundation in Queensland and New South Wales in 2013; and Cyclone Yasi in 2011 in northern Queensland.

To the north of the current storm area sits the city of Townsville on the Queensland coast which has become the first Australian city to use a new disaster resilience scorecard developed by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) in partnership with AECOM and IBM.

The scorecard is an open-source methodology designed for local government use that assists with planning and implementing mitigation measures, engaging stakeholders and designing and delivering recovery plans for infrastructure, services, businesses and the broader community.