Here is a rather gripping personal experience of Cyclone Joan buffetting Port Headland Australia, some years ago.

My brother, Carl Smith, was a travelling salesman at the time and had booked into a motel there. He takes up the story:

Although I have always had a fascination with the weather (as an important issue regarding astronomical observations), my interest really underwent a revolution in the mid to late ‘70s, during which time I sat through Tropical Cyclone Joan at Port Hedland, WA.

I had a gut feeling the storm was going to hit Port Hedland, at least 5 days before the event, when the storm first formed up near Darwin. From the time storm first came to my attention, I fell in to the habit of regularly sitting with an atlas on the bed of my motel unit on the beachfront, plotting the regular 6 hourly updates, and putting up with the inevitable smart remarks from the group of sales-people I was travelling with.

My focus was firmly planted on the transistor radio, listening to the ABC with an ever increasing sense of interest as the reports of the building storm came through, and it soon became apparent that this was a monster cyclone.

The gale force winds were some 500 kms ahead of the eye, and arrived a full 2 days before it hit, with 30ft waves crashing in on the beach and washing up over the road in places.

The 100km/hr cyclone strength winds arrived early in the afternoon before, and the radio updates became 3 hourly.

The wind was gusting up to around 110kms/hr at 4pm, when we saw several either brave or foolish cops in police cars driving around the nearby streets with PA’s blaring telling all martial law had been declared and that any person found on the street would be immediately arrested! We were quite amused by this, as it was so windy that only someone with a screw loose would venture out!

This form of authoritarian madness had ceased by around 5pm, as the wind gusts approached some 125km/hr, and driving a vehicle became obviously impossible!

I continued plotting the now hourly updates, as the intensifying severe storm with wind gusts to 240km/hr near it’s centre first passed us by about 220kms out to sea at 8pm (with the wind gusting around 140km/hr locally), then, the still intensifying storm changed direction and was headed directly towards us.

By midnight, the wind was gusting to around 180 km/hr, and I found myself wondering how the motel was going to stand up to the pounding, as salt water spray from the ocean and an assortment of small crabs was blowing in through the crack beneath the door.

At around 2:30 am, with the wind gusting to around 230km/hr, the door blew open, the wind was so strong that the door had flexed sufficiently under the pressure for the ‘peg’ to pop out of it’s ‘hole’, followed immediately by the window on the other side of the unit doing the same! The wind was roaring through our unit, and fortunately, there was a momentary drop in the intensity of the wind, and the 6 of us in there managed to get the door shut and jam a couple of wardrobes up against it, and shut the window, that fortunately had not broken! We sat through the next couple of hours of near total darkness, hearing frequent loud crashes as something big was hitting the roof. We later realised it was the red housebricks making up the wall around the swimming pool, which had been picked up by the wind and flung onto the roof, smashing the tiles.

As first light came a little after 4am, we could see large cracks running down the courses of ‘besser’ type concrete blocks making up walls in the unit, extending further down the walls with each strong gust, and upon entering the toilet, looked up and could see sky, as the ceiling and roof tiles were missing!

As the daylight got brighter, the wind direction started to change, and was no longer blowing straight on to the door.

There is no accurate record of the windspeed that morning, although the wind speed was recorded up until 4:15am, gusting up to 270km/hr before the equipment on top of the port control tower blew apart! Around 5:30am we removed the wardrobes, and dared to open the door. I will never forget the sight of airborne sea-water flying in over the sea-front units to our left, making a clearly visible line with sea water above it, down to the now visible swimming pool ,that had had a 6 foot high red house brick fence around it the night before, and a stream of chlorinated, bluish-coloured water being picked up from the the pool and streaming out above a clearly defined line, up and over the roof of the units to our right!

Later, when the wind had died down, we saw that the previously full pool had only 2 inches of water left in it!

Awesome!

We were able to stand in an eerie calmness, outside, under the 5’ wide walkway in front of the units, and, when you extended your hand out past the roofline, it was like it was hit by an express train! As we watched, rows of roof tiles were stripped off the roof to our right, and were being flung around like playing cards, sweeping down around the pool area, and, being picked back up again, to hit the roof opposite, and, wherever they hit, more rows of tiles would be stripped off to dissappear over the roofline!

We quickly moved back inside to a safer environment. I know that the wind continued to strengthen up until about 6-7am, and can only guess that it gusted up to near or beyond 300kms/hr! The eye finally crossed the coast at about 7am in an isolated area approx. 50ks SW of Port Hedland, where nothing was left standing of the few buildings there except stumps!

We had only just been spared the most destructive part of the storm, where the eye goes over head and the wind comes back from the other direction, picking up the debris of the first half of the storm, and throwing it back at you!

Instead, the wind shifted around about 90 degrees, and quickly died, dropping below 100km/hr by 9am.

I was absolutely fascinated by the awesome power of the storm, and from around 7:30am, as the wind began to dramatically weaken, was watching as bits and pieces of houses and other debris looking like sheets of paper were flying in the wind and filling the lower atmosphere to a height of at least 500 metres, from my relativly safe vantage point looking downwind over the town from the highest part of the foreshore, with the ocean waves and foam crashing some 200 metres inland just down the road to my SW. Fortunately, it was low tide at the time, or the $22 million damage bill would have been far higher, and many would have drowned! I have had a fascination with tropical storms and other weather phenomena ever since, and have sat through many cyclones, although I have never since experienced one of that severity!

31/10/98