The Blarg of Fosnez

I've had notification from people in Mareeba, Cairns and Townsville. Those areas appear to have survived reasonable well. It's the Cardwell - Ingham area that will be worst effected. The eye passed almost directly over Bingil Bay.

I saw this map posted to facebook. View the complete album here . Lots of Info in there for people in Port Dogulas. Please bear in mind this is an older map and should be used as a guide only.

For those of us that can't be in Cairns, Townsville or anywhere in FNQ for Cyclone Yasi, I will add links to Webcams in Cairns as I find them below, and strike them out as they appear to fail :( Looks like power has gone in Cairns, so most of the cairns ones will be offline. CairnsGreatBarrierReef.org.au (2 minute limit, just refresh the page) CairnsCam.info (The timelaps feature should be quite interesting) CairnsWeatherCam.com.au Edge Hill QLD Transport Webcams: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 CairnsInfo.com Mareeba (George Creek Orchards) Townsville T1 Apartments (Has ads, grrr) Mourilyan Innisfail Townsville - Castle Hill Townsvile 2 webcam Townsville, (West End?) Townsville - West End 2 4 Mile Beach Earlville- Cairns (Little Pink House) Cairns Beaches Cairns - Earlville Cairns - Earlville 2

Cairns Regional Council advises that for those residents who have no alternative for moving to higher ground, evacuation centres will be open at 6am Wednesday 2 February at the following locations: Redlynch High School James Cook University Smithfield State High School Babinda RSL Mossman Community Indoor Sports Centre Woree State High School Conditions at these locations are minimal and residents are encouraged to bring their own bedding, food and medications. Residents are urged to seek shelter with relatives and friends, as using these centres should be a last resort. At these centres no pets, alcohol or weapons of any description will be allowed. Contact the Centre on 4044 3377. If emergency medical assistance is required, dial 000. An evacuation advice has been issued for those residents in the ORANGE (and therefore RED ) Zone on this map . Residents in the ORANGE zone should commence evacuation to higher ground as soon as possible and should register with the ...

A full rant will be following as to why the community has to provide these maps to each other when the council clearly cannot. Anyway. The last Update I was able to see on their website (1/02/2010 10pm EST) is that people in the ORANGE (and therefore RED ) Zones of the below map should evacuate. Download Evacuation Map: PDF ( Mirror ) PNG ( Hi Resolution PNG ) (Seriously CRC, a 12mb PDF? On your servers?) There's a lot of confusion going around about the RED , ORANGE and YELLOW zones. To (unofficially) clarify: The RED zones are the closest to sea level, and the most at risk of flooding. GET OUT NOW . ORANGE is next closest to sea level and as of 1/2/2011 has been advised to evacuate as well. YELLOW is on alert, but not advised to evacuate, yet. Here's just the ORANGE zones (which, obviously, include the RED zones). Click to make bigger:

Cairns Regional Council's Storm Surge Map server is being hammered. The Queensland Police have a mirror available . Also, be sure you check out the Evacuation Maps

Looks like Sheridan Street is getting a Big Brother treatment: I presume they will be used to watch for heavy vehicles running up and down Sheridan Street , because even The Nanny State has said that CCTV for Crime prevention is useless .

I expect to see the speed limit for the bruce highway between cairns and innisfail will soon be reduced to 80km/h or possibly 60km/h. Why you ask? Well, some people have died . Now I may sounds a little heartless here, but every time you strap yourself into one and a half tons of metal, and travel only inches away from other people in tanks traveling at a combined speed of 200km/h, people are going to die. Sorry, but it is that simple. To think otherwise is foolish. Reducing the speed limit seems to be default behaviour for the far north branch of the department of main roads (or whatever they are called this week). Just look at what happened on the Kuranda Range: Speed limit dropped to 60, 2 overtaking lanes removed and only after a number of complains was the speed limited increased to a measly 70 on the long uphill overtaking lane. All this when the speed limit for the (more dangerous) Gillies Range is still 80. Another fine example of bureaucrats that obviously live to the south o...

You all know my opinion of Earth Hour , so reading this got me thinking. Wouldn't it be fitting if this prat is caught that he be electrocuted for a while. Nothing serious, just an electric fence type deal. It would have been interesting if he had been trespassing on my property instead of this old lady's. I'm all for effective environmental action, but this type of econazi extremism is as bad as any other extremism - you have no right to impose your view one anyone else - especially an older lady.

Having just returned from a weekend in Japan (Thanks for the cheap flights JetStar ) I can say I really miss good public transport when I am in Cairns. From my time in London, I can tell you jumping on a train and reading a book for half an hour before work can be a great time to relax. Sure peak hour can be a bit packed, but you deal with it one way or another. Why do I bring this up now? There is a public meeting scheduled to discuss Trains/Trams in Cairns. Info is here and there is a flyer here . Wed, 18th March, 6:45PM Rydges Tradewinds 137 The Esplanade, Trinity Function Room It will be attended by the Mayor, and some of the local candidates. To be sure there will be a lot of "We can't do it because it is not in the Cairns Plan" or some woffle about it not being in the "regional strategic plan". Thats nice. Here's a little tip: If the plans for transport in Cairns revolves around Cars and Buses that are late; Scrap the plans. See how easy that was?

Well, Dear Blarg Readers, changes are afoot at Cairns Central. No I am not talking the good kind. It would appear that someone in Central's management team thinks it would be a great idea to introduce a ticketed parking system. You know, boom gates, ques, the whole shebang! What a fantastic idea, because I don't know about you, but I just love queuing up at those ticking machine, only to have the person infront of me maneuver their tank car so that they don't have to get out of it to get the ticket. What has bought this on? Well I can only assume that it is people (like me) that park my car there when we are at work. Before you shout "Sinner!" give me a viable alternative. Parking metres in the city are there to "encourage" staff of businesses to use alternative parking, now that central is getting the "lockdown" procedure, what alternative do we have? Public transport - Please, pull the other one it has bells on it. I have tried taking the bu...

I friend of the blarg who is in the know about these kinds of things has written to me concerning a recent article on CairnsBlog . There has been a lot of Not in my back yard (NIMBY) about the proposed (approved?) youth facility at Stoney Creek. Here is the text of their message: Just to clarify - this facility will NOT be residential! The Kamerunga site will be a home base for the service to train and store their extensive equipment in order to run a profession, evidence based, best practice service. Currently the service is located in the inner city area with no complaints from the surrounding houses or businesses - could it be there is nothing to complain about? Its a real pity seeing political grandstanding stopping Cairns from engaging an innovative, exciting adventure based service that SUPPORTS and TRAINS the youth workers from our region. It's all about trying new things and getting out of your comfort zone to work with young people - something the public should have a go ...

As I am sure we have all read in the local rag and on CairnsBlog.net - the dengue situation in Cairns is getting rather alarming. Almost to the point that I am less concerned about getting bitten by a snake than I am about being bitten by a blasted mosquito. (The World Health Organization says mosquitoes cause more than 2 million deaths a year worldwide - making it THE most deadly animal.) There is hope however, using the combined power of thousands of computers around the world, the World Community Grid project has already completed over 6000 years of computing time on the Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together subproject. Go here and download the program , be sure to select the Dengue project when you are asked to. It only uses your computer when you are not using it (when you screensaver is active) and will help to predict what new compounds can be used to create antiviral drugs that are effective to cure Dengue!

Walking past the office of Desley Boyle today, I saw that the signs were going up already: With some additional artistic licence from myself This can only mean an election is just around the corner . Be sure to pre-tune your Bullshit Meter. If you don't have one, I suggest you invest in either a Watch , a Button or perhaps a General Bullshit Dector

Too often, we become complacent as to our society's reliance on technology, specifically power. Today, the Cairns region (including up to Mareeba and possibly further) one tenth of Australian (by area) lost all electrical power . I was attempting to get into work to check on my computers during the power outage, poor dears, when I came across an interesting and annoying "safety gone mad" moment. When the city loses power (twice in the last two months I might add) all the boom-gates over railway crossings close. The only way to enter the CBD from the south side (without diverting halfway to Mareeba) was to go up to the top level of Cairns Central on Bunda Street, down two levels of parking and out the Spence Street exit. Too bad if an ambulance needed to get from the CBD to Parramatta Park quickly hey?

Lake Placid Retention Basin Via Krimzon.net Well, it has been an interesting morning already. I was awake at 4:30 becasue the frogs were croaking so loud they woke me up. An interesting way to wake up to say the least... After doing all the normal morning routine I started into work; it was about 7am, so I thought the roads would be fairly clear and it would be a nice (albeit wet) drive in. Yeah... no. Turns out the the frogs were croaking due to the exorbinate amount of rain we were having. I drove down Reservior Road to the first set of traffic lights, and on seeing the traffic banked up through them I thought I would go through one of the streets parallel to Murry Street to avoid the traffic. There was a wee little bit of water on the road (It turns out my car can swim!) and I did get abused spoken to by an SES person for driving through the road when it was flooded. In my defence, they had only closed one end of the road, so how was I supposed to know the entire road was closed ...