Australia Starts Cleanup After Big Cyclone

By MERAIAH FOLEY, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 1 minute ago
CAIRNS, Australia - Metal roofs littered streets, wooden houses lay in splinters and banana plantations were stripped bare after the most powerful cyclone to hit Australia in three decades lashed the country's eastern coast Monday.
Amazingly, the storm caused no reported fatalities, and only 30 people suffered minor injuries. But the damage from Cyclone Larry, a Category 5 storm with winds up to 180 mph, was expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Hardest hit was Innisfail, a farming city of 8,500 people 60 miles south of the tourist city of Cairns in northeastern Queensland state. By Tuesday the storm was well inland and downgraded to a severe low pressure system.
"It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place," Innisfail mayor Neil Clarke told Australian television. "It is severe damage. This is more than a local disaster, this is a national disaster."

In related news, the mayor of Salzburg, Heinz Schaden called on Austrian authorities for aid to assist in returning U.S. FEMA officials to the United States. "They came," the Mayor commented without an interpreter, "to assist us in our clean-up efforts after the hurricane. I told them, when I saw them, that we had no storm, but they insisted on giving me bottled water and a debit card with five thousand US dollars on the balance. Then they picked up our garbage, which angered our sanitation engineers."


The Remains of Salzburg After the Devastating Cyclone

Michael Chertoff, head of the US Department of Homeland Security, insisted that his department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had reacted correctly to the crisis in Australia. "It is that agency's duty to respond to an emergency, quickly and efficiently, and that's what they did - but we, and they, need the cooperation of the local populace to get their job done."

The Austrian ambassador to the United States met with President Bush earlier today. The President commented afterwards that he and the Ambassador had "a good, frank talk," about the U.S. efforts. "I told em'," said the President, "that we had assets to deploy. . . good assets, and people are just going to give their all out there because we're all descenders from England."