The eye finally made landfall, just north of Brisbane. Probably the biggest event was the media circus ... & the utilities failure - the actual storm was drawn out, but not terribly significant.

It was hyped as the first categorized cyclone to make landfall so far south since Zoe in 1974, but something you won't read in the papers is that it actually dropped to Cat-0 just before it made landfall on the mainland - though it did hit some outlying islands (Bribie) as a Cat-1 - so maybe it still counts. Not to say that Tropical Storms can't cause major rain issues (Morakot was a TS for most of it's journey through Taiwan) but that was not the case in this instance.

Re the Cyclone Albo metaphor - it fits pretty well: weak, over-hyped, but still causes widespread damage.

What it did re-expose, on a grander-scale, was the ridiculous fragility of Aus's utility infrastructure. Really, the winds, when it was gusting, were no more than 50-60km - the odd gust going to 70 - but with lots of lull time in between where it was almost dead calm. Somehow that resulted in this statement from the privatized energy provider:

It could take as long as two weeks to restore power to the more than 290,000 homes and businesses across south east Queensland that are currently in the dark.

That 290k is just Queensland - there'd be as many if not more outages in NSW - so 600k odd power outages caused by a Cat-0 cyclone, that didn't cause major flooding? FFS, send a working party to Taiwan to work out how they get through Cat-2-3s without any power outage. Even with Cat-5s it's usually back on within 12 hours.

With the power outage comes internet outage. I don't remember the internet going out ever in Taiwan even in Cat-5s or major earthquakes. You can never get a straight answer if you inquire what the actual problem is - it's always cause: unknown - expected time of restoration: unknown - but i spoke to a senior energy worker & he said they are reliant on the electricity grid to power the machinery at the antennae. Surely you would have a back-up generator for that! Or hey, there's this thing called solar energy now, & batteries ...

Even that doesn't fully explain it coz many times the power has been back on but the internet is still out. Which makes me think they decrease or boost certain signals for certain areas - but that's only uninformed speculation - coz there is no information to the exact cause. Why is there zero information? You have to assume there's a dirty secret somewhere under that info suppression MO.

Anyway, it's made what was already abundantly clear, even more abundantly clearer - you can't live in Aus & rely on private utility companies (charging the most exorbitant prices in the world) to reliably deliver - it doesn't fit the short-term profit model. Luckily, there are work-arounds now. It's an expense that i really don't need right now, but i'm gonna vote with my feet on Monday.

In additions to the 290k outages in Qld, below is the outage map for NSW. So from a Cat-0 storm, wind damage alone caused 600k outages from north of Brisbane (Qld) to Port MacQuarie NSW - a distance of 600+km. That's like a TS eye hitting Taipei & causing simultaneous outages in Okinawa.