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Published: January 6th 2012
It is incredible how the media can help to instill serious panic. As Christmas approached, the front page of the seriously sensationalist NT News (see earlier blog "
No news is good news") got scarier and scarier, warning us about a cyclone (hurricane) that was travelling towards us. There were radio ads with a man with a very stern voice warning people to take it seriously. I imagine there were TV ads as well (we don't have cable). Some locals scoffed at the warnings, while others went completely berserk, emptying all the stores of canned goods and bottled water and waiting in huge line-ups at gas stations to fill their tanks. Some stores even had seriously overpriced "cyclone kits", which were comprised of first aid kits, batteries, flashlights, candles, waterproof matches, and probably some other stuff for a couple of hundred dollars. I'm pretty sure whoever owns the newspaper also owns the grocery stores and gas stations.
A lot of the hype happened because Christmas is the anniversary of 1974's Cyclone Tracy, which totally devastated Darwin. Pretty scary because apparently at that time, most people were not taking the government warnings very seriously and then in the end, it was a total disaster. Cyclone Tracy
No more water
The cyclone was predicted to hit on Dec 24 and I went to the grocery store on Dec 22 and they were almost sold out of water. All surrounding stores and gas stations as well!killed 71 people and destroyed more than 70% of Darwin's buildings, leaving over 41,000 people homeless (total population only 47,000 at that time). No joke.
So when the government released several official advisories telling people to take it seriously and get prepared for a cyclone, we took it more seriously. We were tracking the path of the cyclone on the weather website and monitoring how fast and what direction it was moving. We didn't go all out like some people but we decided to do a few things. We filled up our car with gas, got some first aid stuff and instead of buying bottled water we planned to fill up all our pots and bowls with water, should things progress (we never ended up doing it). We didn't buy more food because we figured that between our bodily fat supply and the food we already had in our cupboards, we'd be fine. We also brought in all our stuff from our balcony as we didn't want our potted garden to get ruined.
We laughed -sometimes nervously- about the possibility of spending Majeed's birthday (Dec 24) and possibly Christmas Day locked inside our bathroom with a candle, a
Woolies grocery store
This may not look out of the ordinary but it is. I've never seen more than a dozen customers at a time at Woolies. But that day everyone was out buying hundreds of dollars worth of canned goods and bottled water. Chaos! box of crackers and a bottle of wine. But in the end, the cyclone hit way far east of Darwin.
Not that I know much about cyclones, but one thing that consoled me and kept me mostly calm is that the birds never left. I figured wouldn't the birds fly inland if the cyclone got near? My farmer background comes in handy sometimes. hehe
So besides the consumer craze, life went on as usual during the 'warning days' and we went about our business celebrating Majeed's birthday and spending Christmas Day with some friends. And by the way, the real name of this cyclone wasn't Santa, but rather Cyclone Grant. I'm glad we never met.
Scroll down to see more pictures!
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