Slowly, inexorably—

I've always wanted to use that word—Hamish tracks its way down the coastline. The 7 p.m. bulletin had the wind gusts near the center at 275 kilometers an hour, nearly 200 mph. & at 275 kmh, it's getting very close to the >280kph that defines a Category 5 cyclone.


4 p.m.
Cyclones, hurricanes & typhoons are all the same thing; it's just that they're named differently in different parts of the world. &, of course, each place has a different scale of measuring them though they tend to overlap.

Although Hurricane Katrina reached Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, it had been downgraded to Category 3—& would be the same here—in the U.S. by the time it hit the Louisiana coast. The destruction it caused was through the accompanying storm surge, where the sea overran the land. In Australia, most damage is caused by the wind & rain on land, as the cyclone passes across inhabited areas, which means that it's the East Coast that suffers most, even though the coast of Western Australia tends to have more cyclones & of higher intensity.


7 p.m.
No word yet of where this cyclone will cross the coast or if, in fact, it will. I note, however, that we're now on the latest cyclone tracking map which tends to worry me a little. So I've been reading up on the last cyclone—though there's not much information—that made landfall around here, sixty years & a few days ago, destroying about 500 houses & damaging 1000 more. A few lives lost from the cyclone, a few more from the flooding that accompanied it. Lasted somewhere between two & six days, depending on the account.

The 11 p.m. bulletin has just been released & the Bureau of Meteorology has upgraded Cyclone Hamish to category 5, with wind gusts now 295 kph near the center & the central pressure has dropped to 930 hectoPascals.


11 p.m.
Will keep you posted.

p.s. All images come from the Bureau of Meteorology site for Queensland weather.