A powerful tropical cyclone in Western Australia has made landfall for a third time as residents still brace for damage by the wind gusts and heavy rainfall.
Narelle made landfall near the Coral Bay on Friday night and is lying over the Gascoyne east of Denham, weakening as it moves quickly southeast.
“On Saturday, the system is expected to continue tracking quickly south-southeast over land while weakening further. Impacts will extend into the Central West, before spreading further inland and south across the South West Land Division,” the Bureau of Meteorology said.
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“The strongest winds are expected to remain on the eastern side of the system.”
Winds of up to 125km/h are forecast to extend inland from Carnarvon to Overlander Roadhouse while Morawa may also be impacted.
Heavy rainfall which may lead to flash flooding is possible over the Gascoyne and Central West.
‘You can hear stuff flying around outside.’
The fury of Narelle has been felt in Exmouth where a carport has been felled, and part of the roof was ripped off. It is one of many houses in the town with significant damage.
About 40 people were inside the evacuation centre when the roof sheets peeled off there.
It was too dangerous to evacuate anyone from the hall, so they had to weather this storm inside the damaged building.
A service station was destroyed with windows smashed, bowsers torn apart while trees were down on roads and a telephone box was flattened.
The tidal surge swamped canals and left homes underwater.
Roof panels been ripped off a house in Exmouth by Tropical Cyclone Narelle on Friday Credit: Brock Keymer/supplied
For Craig Kitson who has lived in Exmouth for more than 20 years, Narelle packed more of a punch than Vance.
“Vance was done in about four hours where this one sat for about 12 hours, so it was a wild night,” he said.
“The garden fence has been smashed next door they copped an absolute flogging, roof gone smashed through the other neighbours.,” another resident Ethan Rowe said.
“You can hear stuff flying around outside, but you’ve got no idea what it is, or you’ve just got no idea on anything,” local Virginia Van Bree said.
“These have just literally lifted up out of the ground. And they’re like a couple of hundred kilos each.”
Authorities say rapid damage assessment teams have been mobilised to assess the destruction over the next 24 hours, with the priority focus helping people who have been severely impacted by the winds and rainfall.
Australia’s biggest LNG plants offline due to cyclone
Narelle disrupted production at the country’s two biggest liquefied natural gas plants run by Chevron and Woodside, exacerbating a global supply crunch caused by the conflict in the Middle East.
Australia became the world’s second-largest LNG exporter after Qatar shut down production in March following damage to its facilities from Iranian strikes.
Global LNG flows out of the Middle East have also been upended by Iran’s blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.
Chevron said it was working to restore production at its Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG facilities in Western Australia following outages that were likely due to Tropical Cyclone Narelle, a category three storm, which crossed the coast on Friday.
Narelle has been downgraded to a category three system, but is still packing a punch. (PR IMAGE PHOTO) Credit: AAP
Gorgon is Australia’s largest LNG export facility, producing 15.6 million tonnes a year with three processing trains, while the smaller Wheatstone consists of two trains producing 8.9 million tonnes.
Woodside also said production at its Karratha gas plant had been disrupted by the cyclone.
The gas plant is the onshore processing facility for the North West Shelf, Australia’s oldest and second-largest LNG project, producing 14.3 million tonnes a year, down from 16.9 million tonnes a year after it shut down one of its five production trains.
MST Marquee analyst Saul Kavonic estimated the cyclone was disrupting more than 30 million tonnes a year of Australian LNG supply.
Combined with the shock from the Middle East, he said more than a quarter of global LNG supply was affected.
“This will exacerbate gas market tightness in Asia and Europe, especially if it takes more than a matter of days to normalise Australian production levels again,” Kavonic said.
An outage affected Chevron’s Gorgon facility on Barrow Island as Cyclone Narelle passed. (Marion Rae/AAP PHOTOS) Credit: AAP
A Chevron Australia spokesperson said an outage occurred at the Wheatstone platform, about 225km off Australia’s west coast, on Thursday, causing a suspension of onshore gas production.
“All personnel were demobilised from the Wheatstone Platform ahead of the cyclone passing, which has been operated remotely from our Perth office since Tuesday afternoon,” the spokesperson said.
Three hours later, an outage shut down one of three LNG production trains at the Gorgon facility on Barrow Island, about 50km offshore.
“We will resume full production at both facilities once it is safe to do so,” a Chevron Australia spokesperson said.
Woodside said production at the North West Shelf project would restart once it is able to send workers back to its offshore facilities.
It said operations were continuing at its Macedon domestic gas plant and its Pluto LNG facility.
“If there is any material impact to production or assets, Woodside will update the market,” a spokesperson said.
– With AAP
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