Locals and visitors alike are shocked at the devastation wrought by the storm’s long, terrifying journey across Australia’s coast

Those who could pack up and leave in the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie did so at the first opportunity.

As soon as flood waters receded and the highway reopened, five Danish backpackers in a hire car made a beeline out of the north Queensland strike zone.

Two days after tearing through the tourist paradise of the Whitsunday Islands and battering the Bowen region food bowl, the storm was still creating disaster zones across a 1,400km (870-mile) stretch of eastern Australia to the south.

As a category four cyclone that made their hostel windows bounce and blew down big trees before their eyes, Debbie was harrowing enough for the young travellers, something they understood was “comparable to Hurricane Katrina in the US”.

But they wanted to leave mainly because Whitsunday boat trips were cancelled and on the mainland in Airlie Beach, the islands’ normally idyllic gateway town, things had turned a little squalid.

During three days without power and two days without running water, they had got by in a hostel eating convenience store snacks and using buckets of pool water to flush the toilet.

“It was so nasty,” one of the backpackers, Nanna Ring, said with a horrified grin.

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On Friday, 72 hours after the storm struck and 24 hours after the Danes left, there was still no power or running water at Airlie Beach. The army came to distribute 24,000 litres of water.

It was a similar story across the other hardest hit parts of north Queensland – Bowen, Proserpine and the Whitsundays – where flooded roads, damaged power and phone networks and relentless bad weather stymied the best-laid recovery plans by authorities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Danish tourists (from left) Line Kristensen, Nanna Ring, Anne Noergaard, Andreas Nordbo and Sofie Bak. Photograph: Joshua Robertson/The Guardian

In Collinsville, an inland mining town where Debbie stunned locals by destroying buildings and homes, Kerry Cowan said: “Everyone is in such desperate need for fuel and water. They’re all getting so low on everything now.”

Debbie was not the most damaging cyclone to hit the Queensland coast, even in recent years. But it was one of the largest, and its legacy was still wreaking havoc on Friday, with flooding rains over a large expanse.

Lismore in northern New South Wales, 870 miles from Bowen, was inundated. In Logan City, south of Brisbane, more than 300 houses were expected to be flooded.

Rockhampton in central Queensland might flood next week, the Bureau of Meteorology warned.

The total cost from Debbie, declared a catastrophe in two states by the Insurance Council of Australia, is weeks if not months away from calculation. But insured losses alone will run into hundreds of millions, if not more than $1bn (£600m). The sugar cane industry has forecast a $150m blow, and the Bowen region’s $450m-a-year horticulture industry will also suffer heavy losses that could cause the price of household staples such as tomatoes to rise later in the year.

At its point of impact in north Queensland, Debbie had fierce gusts of up to 263km/h (163mph), an eye up to 100km across and a lingeringly slow pace that menaced communities for up to 12 hours before it passed.

Remarkably, it resulted in no immediate deaths and one serious injury in the strike zone. The body of one woman was found in flood water south of Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales on Friday. A second victim died after the car she was in was swept away.



Ex-cyclone Debbie: woman's body found as disaster zones declared in NSW Read more

But the storm damaged thousands of properties, rendering 270 uninhabitable. Among those was the Bowen hilltop home of Errol and Margaret Kreymborg, who have discovered how fickle a storm can be, no matter how you prepare for it.

“We’ve always been prepared for cyclones,” Margaret said. “You got the gas bottles all full, your gas cookers, your jerry cans full of petrol, your generator. We’ve done everything we could. But when your house gets destroyed, they’re useless to you.”

Their two carpenter sons had boarded up the windows before the storm. But Debbie lifted off the roof – including its new solar panels – almost in its entirety. The next night a torrent of rain – 250mm in two hours – poured into the exposed structure, all but destroying it, and setting it up for a bulldozer. The house had been renailed and renovated. It had stood since 1956 and previously belonged to a prominent community figure who had taught four generations of children at the school across the road.

Luckily the Kreymborgs were not in their home when the roof was lost. They sheltered at a son’s neighbour’s home, a $1m concrete residence, with five grandchildren in tow. But even there, all the front doors and windows were blown out.

“We spent five hours holding the double doors in the rest of the house, which would have got blown through, four of us taking turns,” Errol said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Errol and Margaret Kreymborg outside their wrecked house in Bowen. Photograph: Joshua Robertson/The Guardian

It was a harrowing night for Errol. At one point he went next door with his son to get tools and timber to reinforce the doors, making it just before a shed “came whizzing past us” in the gale.

Errol stepped into the kitchen to get food for the children, when the ceiling collapsed on him, plaster hitting him in the face. “Then I had to come back and see my house finally when the wind stopped blowing,” he said.

The Kreymborgs, in the exhausting, stressful aftermath of the whole experience, with no power for their mobile phones amid patchy coverage, could not bring themselves to call their insurance company until Thursday.

“We’ve got no food. The water’s gone, you can’t wash pots and pans, we’re over here collecting water so the kids have got some. You’re saturated, worn out, there’s no electricity, you’re trying to get a few clothes pegged on the line just so you can operate. You couldn’t even get to the point mentally where you could ring the insurance company,” Errol said.

“You’re still trying to process what’s going on,” Margaret said.

Over on the Whitsunday Islands, thousands of holidaymakers had spent days waiting to evacuate formerly picture-perfect resorts that had been smashed. Water had to be rationed on Daydream Island, while on Hamilton Island – a popular haunt for celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Taylor Swift – thousands of guests crowded the small airport looking for a flight out in chaotic scenes on Thursday.

Peter Langtree was in a group that spurned an evacuation to Airlie Beach and chartered their own flight to Mackay.

“The roads are closed north and south of Proserpine, so we would have been stuck in Airlie Beach with no food, water or power. I have a daughter still stuck in Airlie now.”

Hamilton Island’s longest-standing resident, Nikki Phillips, endured the storm on three fronts. Her house on the island was “totally inundated, flooded, the roof is caving in, and there’s broken glass everywhere”.

Her garden was “annihilated”, with all 35 palm trees blown out of the ground. Four of the shops she owns at the main resort are “full of water and absolutely stuffed”.

“This place is flattened. It’s just unbelievable,” she said. “I think we’re at the stage where nobody knows where to start.”

On another small island to the south that Phillips owns, Farrier Island, “the beach is on my front door – it was 300 metres away before”.

And on the mainland, on the outskirts of Proserpine, her Whitsunday Gold coffee plantation had its main residence destroyed, as well as coffee and sugar crops.

Phillips said she paid $110,000 a year in insurance premiums for her assets and hadn’t made a claim in 35 years. Finally doing so was “going to be interesting”, she said.

“This one friend of mine said ‘they’ll be nice to you today, but in a week they’ll turn into you know what, they’ll change their tune’.”

Phillips said Cyclone Debbie’s timing had been rotten, with the island booked out over the school holidays, beginning next week.

On the upside, the island’s generators kept power and water supply going. “We’ve all had showers this morning, we’ve all had a cup of coffee and we’re all just in overdrive now,” Phillips said. “I just hope we can get trading. The ferocity of Debbie, we’ve done remarkably well not to have anyone killed. As we put it, she was an absolute moll.”

Thousands told to evacuate as ex-Cyclone Debbie wreaks havoc Read more

Ali and Graham Simpson, who run Phillips’ plantation and coffee shop, were counting their blessings after watching the cyclone tear apart their residence’s roof and wipe out their bumper coffee crop, which was weeks from harvest.

At least, Ali said, they had enough warning to move their precious items into “memory boxes” to store safely in the coffee shop before they watched the house get destroyed. “With a bushfire you don’t get to pick and choose what you can salvage, you lose everything.”

The 80-year-old mango trees and their animals, including three horses and two cockatoos, all survived Debbie’s onslaught. “But the coffee trees going, that was the saddest thing because we’ve planted all those,” she said.

“Graham was so proud because we had a really good lead-up season and the trees were laden with coffee cherries but they’ve just been stripped, so there clearly will be no harvest this year.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Whitsunday Gold coffee plantation’s co-manager, Ali Simpson, inspects her damaged coffee crop. Photograph: Joshua Robertson/The Guardian

That’s a loss of 100,000 coffee trees yielding six tonnes of dwarf catuai beans, a strain that won them a bronze medal at the Sydney royal fine food show last month.

The family left the house to shelter in the coffee shop amid roaring winds that had them afraid to go the toilet while the bathroom window throbbed to apparent bursting point.

They watched the wild weather dismantle their life’s work for another 12 hours as Debbie’s eye passed right over nearby Proserpine.

American cyclone chaser Josh Morgerman, who flew to Australia to see his first southern hemisphere storm in Debbie, had his car swamped by water in Proserpine and ended up sheltering with a local.

Morgerman told ABC it was “quite a cyclone, an impressive storm. With Debbie what we had was a very, very strong cyclone, a solid category four and it was big, it was huge, it was a large system and it moved slowly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Queensland residents use a boat to cross a flooded street. Photograph: Jason O'Brien/Getty Images

“So places like Proserpine, this thing just took forever to pass. I think out of all the cyclones I’ve been in this has taken the longest to come through. The amount of hours of destructive winds pounding this region, it was basically 24 hours, which is like, crazy.”

Ali Simpson said Debbie came on the tail of “a really awful couple of weeks” for the Proserpine community, which had been rocked by the suicides of three local men, several sudden deaths and “then a couple of older people dying”.

“This is in the two weeks leading up to Debbie. The whole community’s been hit really hard anyway.”

The precise toll of the cyclone on the communities that bore its brunt will become clearer in the months and years to come, along with the wearying scale of the task of rebuilding once the broader public and media focus on the drama of the spectacle fades.

But it is not lost on locals that these extreme weather events become markers in a community’s life as well as a rallying point for their shared identity.

As one Collinsville resident put it: “Everybody is pitching in, helping those who do not know what to do and those who just need a hand. There’s been a great community spirit that was here years ago and has now returned in Debbie’s aftermath.”