Rhondhu Stud - Cyclone Yasi Survivors

When Cyclone Yasi attacked Queensland in early February the devastation across a huge area was immense.  Vicki Miller of Rhondhu Stud, located directly in the cyclone's path, tells us about their terrifying experience and how they managed to keep themselves and their horses safe in the face of such an awesome force of nature... (story & photos: Vicki Miller)

Rhondhu Stud is our family business. I help my parents, Barry & Liz Miller in everything to do with our property, ‘Grass Hut’ Station, which is just 80 km from Townsville by road.

“Cyclone Yasi, now a category 5, is estimated to hit between Cairns and Townsville and extending to non-coastal areas.” We’d been tracking this monster for days, and this shift of direction was all it took for us to realise that we needed to act fast and act now to protect our 40 mares and new foals, 20 priceless competition mares, countless yearlings and weanlings, and our 6 beloved stallions.  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and equipment, plus our 120 year old Queenslander home.  For two days and nights, we worked tirelessly, moving horses into electric fence paddocks in front of the house where there were no trees and we could keep a watchful eye over them during the cyclone.  Fortunately, the new 60m x 120m stables were probably the safest complex on the whole of ‘Grass Hut,’ and provided safe keeping for Shining Sheriff* (pictured right), Docs Truman, Mr Charisma, Acre Maker and junior sires Red Duck and Blue Print, as well as many of our vehicles.

Dad spent most of the two days trimming dangerous tree limbs, shifting all of his trucks, cattle trailers and flat tops as well as our campdraft gooseneck, and other equipment into tree-free and safe shed areas, while Mum and I moved every horse, packed up reproduction equipment and saddlery before moving onto the huge task of our house.  While our renovated Queenslander is in lovely condition, we were still wary of its age and how sturdy it might be in the 150km plus winds that were predicted.  Packing up all of our important personal items and box loads of paperwork at the same time as taping windows and getting emergency kit together, we worked well into the night of the cyclone. We finally had our full house packed up and relocated into our staff dongas, our horses and vehicles safe, now we were just waiting like sitting ducks for the outcome.

Finally, by 9 pm on Wednesday the 2^nd, we sat down for dinner, extremely nervous and tense for the hours ahead, in darkness of course as the power had already gone out. The sound of the radio blasting on the verandah kept us alert, with wind picking up around 9.30 pm that night.  At the door, was a little stash of items to pick up and run with in case our roof started to lift.  By midnight, the wind had started to howl and scream through the darkness; standing at the door, we could hear a deep rumbling coming from almost twenty kms away! The wind came in huge gusts, belting tree limbs against the house and sheds, following by belts of wind ravaged rain, each gust awing us into a worried silence, each time praying it wouldn’t get any stronger. Mum constantly shone the torch out into the paddock, window by window desperately trying to spot our horses outside, almost wearing a pad around our house by daylight like a racehorse looking for mates.  As the windows started rattling, and the wind pushed against our poor old house, we could hear the roof start shifting around 3am in the morning. Never in my life have I been so frightened, just waiting fearfully for the winds to tear the roof from our house.  You could not see a single thing outside, and the sound of what we now know was the chook shed disintegrating from its cement slab until it became an unrecognisable pile of tin wedged up against the dog kennels, had us sitting on the edge of our seats in anxious silence. Amazing how tough chooks are!

Daylight seemed to take forever to finally arrive, and even though the wind and rain did not give us any reprieve until well after lunch, it was relieving to know we still had our roof, to be able to look outside and see all our horses & gear safe, and to actually visualise what we could only hear during the long dark hours of the night. Our rain guage showed 197mm or 8“, so we also knew that there would not be a floodgate standing.

In the aftermath of Yasi, the cleanup is still continuing, and will do for months. We were very lucky that our old roof remained intact, that none of our machinery was damaged, and most importantly none of our horses.  However, if we had left the mares and foals in their paddock, this could have been a heart wrenching story; their paddock was full of lovely shady trees (that would have been used for shelter if we had of left them there), but now, there are few trees to be seen standing in their paddock, and broken barb wire fences every 10 – 20 metres! It was not until 2 days after the cyclone that we could finally get around to see the real damage on our property. Devastating. Depressing. 

The never ending pattern of broken fences, wrecked strainer posts, rails in stockyards and twisted windmills from ancient ghost gum trees and bloodwoods crashing down during the winds is reoccurring throughout the entire property and will take months to fix, with our little crew working from daylight til dark on fences for the first 2 weeks. Just on our meagre 20,000 acres at Grass Hut, we estimate to have 10 – 50% of trees down in various places, and again we have estimated to have 50% damage to at least 100kms of fences and yards. Nearly every windmill damaged, and 8 paddocks of stud cattle totally mixed up amongst themselves and the neighbours like a jar of spilt jelly beans. Just the mustering and processing of all of our cattle is an expensive and daunting task on its own, let alone the onslaught of wreckage to deal with first!

Whilst none of the horses or cattle were killed or severely injured, many of the foals and calves have extreme rain scald, some losing most of the hair on the back, others had temperatures of 39 – 40 degrees from standing in the cold harsh rain and wind for two days.  We even have a few foals that have joint infections from bacteria absorbed through their navels in the mud, and mares that have slipped foals from the stress of enduring the cyclone.

Without a doubt, we had plenty of notice from cyclone warnings, and our foresight to work like Trojans and think carefully about putting everything in order around our house, horses and vehicles has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage and many deaths and injuries with livestock.

No doubt, we have come out of this very well compared to many others far worse off than us, and for that we are grateful, but even still we estimate our damages bill to be well over $100,000, and a work load that will now consume our year in efforts to reconstruct. There are properties much larger and with more damaged than us, and there will be many stories just like ours that fall on deaf ears of Government bureaucrats, as it seems ‘they’ think we don’t need any financial assistance because there wouldn’t be much infrastructure on a cattle property, and if our house is OK then so are we! Most of the graziers in this district, like us, apparently are not even eligible for the $1000 each, let alone access to the $25,000 business grants or the possibility of concessional loans. All we can hope for is that even though our plight is not as bad as some, it is still bad enough by normal standards, and definitely worthy of assistance somehow, and hopefully political representatives from this district can persuade the powers to be, to look outside the square, and notice the grazing industry is really hurting too.

 

Thank you Vicki for sharing your story - we hope that all goes well with the clean up and affected graziers receive the assistance they so badly need.

Visit www.rhondhustud.com.au to find out more about Rhondhu's stallions standing at stud, competition horses and horses for sale.