i know, shocking! must have charged him tourists rates

Yup. Solomon Islands copped it big time unfortunately

Ummmmm, at lunchtime I popped into Noosa to go to bank - big sign on ANZ door saying 'Closed due to Tsunami'! What???? Anyway, lots of people were complaining, apparently their head office is in Cairns, and with that closed, they all had to close!

seens of utter chaos in cairns today. people literally fleeing for the hills. massive traffick jams on all the range roads.people just up and left work for the day.

yeah my mate said that! Prob is, after watching what happened with the 2005 Tsunami, people are going to be scared. I know where I'd run too!

the problem was that people left there cyclone proof houses and places of work which would afford some protection against a wave to jump into there cars and sit in a jam on the highway where they would have just got washed away.

good point. I take it you stayed put? Will watch it on the news tonight.

just kept on working. its normally the cyclones that send the locals into mass panic. they can be 1000 miles away and everyone runs round like headless chickens.

Ste and I were in the city and we met up and then drove to the kids school, collected them and went home together - when you've got children you want to have them under your wing and to be together.

No-one knew what it would do when it got here, as there was so much ocean to cross. I'm guessing a bit about why the beaches were closed later in the day, but there was still an alert for bigger waves than usual, so I think it was probably a better safe than sorry - as Biggy said, the ocean was very weird.
It could have been very nasty - the Solomons got it badly, and anyone who thinks the authorities overreacted here should remember - if we hadn't issued any warnings, and Qld had been hit badly, you'd all have been baying for our blood. Better safe than sorry.

There really was an air of holding our breath at work - with the cyclones you see them coimng on radar, you can predict the track and strength to some extent. A tsunami is a lot harder to track, and just builds out of nowhere, one minute things are calm, next minute you have an earthquake and a mega-wave.
A lot of evacuation plans were being put into action, but its a tightrope to wlak - how soon do you move people, how soon are you sure the wave is coming........

There were the lighter moments though, like the woman who rang us to say she is on holiday in Noosa over Easter and could we tell her if there would be another tsunami then, cos she might cancel her holiday if another one was coming

And I have to admit a certain smug feeling to see that the public face of Emergency Management Queensland was one of my bosses - a very English gentleman

Did I miss something???

There was certainly a lot of choice mid-morning in the free parking around the CBD.

The chaos on the range roads must have been something to see.

At least it cleared the Mondayitis up pretty quick.

The interesting thing was how quickly the land >mobile network ground to a halt.

WW

So can I and it's 6.30 in the evening

I think the Boxing day 2004 Tsunami is still relatively fresh in peoples minds and lets face it, Tsunamis are a fairly unknown quantity, really. There is no real speed with the warning systems as today has proved, by the time the Tsunami centre in Hawaii had picked it up, it was already doing over the Soloman Islands and ripples heading outward, but it's still humane duty to warn all possibly affected areas and then the panic happens...

Its tough in Cairns because theres really nowhere to go - north or south - all beach, so individuals head for the range (thinking get to higher ground) and the inevitable traffic jams occur - I've never seen as much traffic as we did today coming back home from the city - unreal. I don't blame anyone for worrying though, for low lying areas a hit from a Tsunami could mean you're toast.

Yeah, see my 'telstra sucks thread".