Severe Tropical Cyclone Tracy was a small but destructive tropical cyclone that devastated the city of Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia, in December 1974. The small but developing easterly storm was originally expected to pass clear of the city, but it turned towards it early on 24 December. After 10:00 p.m. ACST, damage became severe, with wind gusts reaching before instruments failed. The anemometer in Darwin Airport control tower had its needle bent in half by the strength of the gusts.
Residents of Darwin were celebrating Christmas, and they did not immediately acknowledge the emergency, partly because they had been alerted to an earlier cyclone (Selma) which passed west of the city, not affecting it in any way. Additionally, news outlets had only a skeleton crew on duty over the holiday.
The fatality count from Tracy was 66 people, while the damage it caused was A$837 million (about A$ in 2022; approximately US$5.2 billion in 2022). It destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin's buildings, including 80 percent of houses. It left more than 25,000 out of the 47,000 inhabitants of the city homeless prior to landfall and required the evacuation of over 30,000 people, of whom many never returned. After the storm passed, the city was rebuilt using more stringent standards "to cyclone code". At the time, Tracy held the record worldwide for the smallest tropical cyclone in terms of gale-force wind diameter, a record that was held for 34 years until it was broken by Tropical Storm Marco in the Atlantic basin of 2008.
Meteorological history
On 20 December 1974, the United States' ESSA-8 environmental satellite recorded a large cloud mass centred over the Arafura Sea about northeast of Darwin. This disturbance was tracked by the Darwin Weather Bureau's regional director Ray Wilkie, and by senior meteorologist Geoff Crane. On 21 December, the ESSA-8 satellite showed evidence of a newly formed circular centre near latitude 8° south and longitude 135° east. Crane - the meteorological duty officer at the time - issued the initial tropical cyclone alert, describing the storm as a tropical low that could develop into a tropical cyclone.
Later in the evening, the Darwin meteorological office received an infrared satellite image from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's satellite, NOAA-4, showing that the low pressure had developed further and that spiralling clouds could be observed. The storm was officially pronounced a tropical cyclone at around 10p.m. on 21 December, when it was around to the north-northeast of Cape Don ( northeast of Darwin). Cyclone Tracy was first observed on the Darwin radar on the morning of 22 December.
Over the next few days, the cyclone moved in a southwesterly direction, passing north of Darwin on 22 December. A broadcast on ABC Radio that day stated that Cyclone Tracy posed no immediate threat to Darwin. However, early in the morning of 24 December, Tracy rounded Cape Fourcroy on the western tip of Bathurst Island, and moved in a southeasterly direction, straight towards Darwin. The bureau's weather station at Cape Fourcroy measured a mean wind speed of at 9:00 that morning.
By late afternoon on 24 December, the sky over the city was heavily overcast, with low clouds, and was experiencing strong rain. Wind gusts increased in strength; between 10p.m. (local time) and midnight, the damage became serious, and residents began to realise that the cyclone would not pass by the city, but over it. On 25 December at around 3:30a.m., Tracy's centre crossed the coast near Fannie Bay. The highest recorded wind gust from the cyclone was , which was recorded around 3:05a.m. at Darwin Airport. The anemometer (wind speed instrument) failed at around 3:10a.m., with the wind vane (wind direction) destroyed after the cyclone's eye passed over. The Bureau of Meteorology's official estimates suggested that Tracy's gusts had reached . The lowest air pressure reading during Tracy was , which was taken at around 4a.m., by a Bureau staff member at Darwin Airport. This was recorded during the eye of the cyclone. From around 6:30a.m., the winds began to ease, with the rainfall ceasing at around 8:30 a.m. After making landfall, Tracy rapidly weakened, dissipating on 26 December. Total rainfall in Darwin from Cyclone Tracy was at least .Cyclone Tracy, National Museum Australia
Preparations
Darwin had been severely battered by cyclones before: in January 1897 and again in March 1937. However, in the 20 years leading up to Cyclone Tracy, the city had undergone a period of rapid expansion. E.P. Milliken estimated that on the eve of the cyclone there were 43,500 people living in 12,000 dwellings in the Darwin area. Though building standards at the time required that some attention be given to the possibility of cyclones, most buildings were not capable of withstanding the force of a cyclone's direct hit.
On the day of the cyclone, most residents of Darwin believed that the cyclone would not cause any damage to the city. Cyclone Selma had been predicted to hit Darwin earlier in the month, but it instead went north and dissipated without affecting Darwin in any way. As a result, Cyclone Tracy took most Darwin residents by surprise. Despite several warnings, the people of Darwin did not evacuate or prepare for the cyclone. Many residents continued to prepare for Christmas, and many attended Christmas parties despite the increasing winds and heavy rain. Journalist Bill Bunbury interviewed the residents of Darwin sometime later and recorded the experiences of the survivors of the cyclone in his book Cyclone Tracy: Picking Up the Pieces. Resident Dawn Lawrie, a 1971 independent candidate for the electorate of Nightcliff, told him:
Another resident, Barbara Langkrens, said:
Impact
Cyclone Tracy destroyed about 80% of the Darwin city. 94% of housing was uninhabitable. At Darwin Airport, thirty-one aircraft were destroyed and another twenty-five badly damaged.
Deaths Cyclone Tracy killed 66 people on land and at sea. In the cyclone's aftermath, the number of deaths reported varied from 49 to 66, as an official list of deaths was never compiled. Nearly thirty years later, the last two missing ships were located in Darwin Harbour, MV Booya in October 2003 and the ferry Darwin Princess in May 2004. Police divers investigated both wrecks and found no human remains but did retrieve some personal effects. In March 2005, the Northern Territory Coroner held an inquest into the people suspected to have died on board, declaring them deaths at sea. Following the inquest, the death total was raised to 71, and this was widely published. However recent research by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory has determined that this figure includes five deaths that were double counted, reducing the overall total to 66. Of these, 45 died on land and 21 died at sea.
Reporting Several factors delayed the dissemination of the news of the cyclone's impact to the country. The intensity and track of the cyclone had destroyed virtually all telecommunication and radio equipment in the city, including the transmission equipment at both Royal Australian Navy bases HMAS Melville and HMAS Coonawarra. The first communication link reestablished in the aftermath was via HF Radio sourced from a Connellan Airways de Havilland Heron that had been hastily stored in an empty hangar at Darwin Airport the night before, being anchored to towing equipment and weighed down with of beer cartons. From this aircraft, pilot David Fredrickson contacted the Katherine Flight Service Center by mid-morning to convey news of the disaster. He then spent much of the day relaying messages on behalf of emergency services, Navy personnel and airport staff until additional communication links were established later in the day.
The destruction of transportation infrastructure and the distance between Darwin and the rest of the Australian population played a role in the delayed information dissemination, as did the fact the storm made landfall on Christmas Day and most media outlets only had a skeleton crew rostered on at best. Most Australians were not aware of the cyclone until late in the afternoon. Dick Muddimer, a reporter for the local ABC radio station, 8DR, credited as being the man who informed the rest of the nation about the cyclone, after finding out that the ABC's studios on Cavenagh Street were completely knocked off transmission, was able to travel through the wreckage and the storm to the studios of the local television station NTD-8 to send a message to the ABC station in Mount Isa, Queensland, to notify ABC headquarters in Sydney that Darwin had been hit by a cyclone.History of 105.7 ABC Darwin from ABC Online
Governance In order to provide the initial emergency response, a committee was created. The committee, composed of several high-level public servants and police, stated that, "Darwin had, for the time being, ceased to exist as a city". Gough Whitlam, the Australian prime minister, was on an official trip to Europe at the time and flew to Darwin immediately upon hearing of the disaster. Additionally, the Australian government began a mass evacuation by road and air; all of the Defence Force personnel throughout Australia, along with the entire Royal Australian Air Force's fleet of transport planes, were recalled from holiday leave and deployed to evacuate civilians from Darwin as well as to bring essential relief supplies to the area. Thirteen RAN ships were used to transport supplies to the area as part of Operation Navy Help Darwin, which is the largest humanitarian or disaster relief operation ever performed by the Royal Australian Navy.
Health and essential services crisis As soon as the worst of the storm had passed, Darwin faced several immediate health crises. On Christmas Day, the Darwin Hospital treated well over five hundred patients, with 112 of these being admitted into the hospital, and both of the facility's operating theatres being utilised. The first casualties did not arrive till 7a.m. because of high winds and severe road conditions in and around the Darwin area. Operating continued throughout the night and into the early morning. Local teams worked without relief until the arrival of a surgical team from Canberra late that day. Those who were considered unable to return to work within two weeks were evacuated by air to safer locations.
All official communications out of Darwin were no longer operational. The antennas at the OTC Coastal Radio Service station (callsign VID) were destroyed during the storm. Station manager Bob Hooper, who was an amateur radio operator, helped to establish communications using his own equipment. By 10a.m., Gary Gibson, another amateur operator, was able to establish a station at the Darwin Community College, and within a short period of time, a network of stations was established across the country. This network, coordinated by Melbourne D24 police, provided message services to the cities of Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Townsville, Brisbane, Adelaide, Alice Springs, Gove, Mount Isa, Cairns, Rockhampton, Mackay, Lismore and Cooma.Electronics Australia magazine March 1975 By 10:40a.m., VID operators had established VID2 on board Nyanda in Darwin Harbour, and then for five days official communications traffic in and out of Darwin was handled via continuous wave radio (Morse code). The only local radio station that was not completely disabled was the ABC's 8DR. For the next two days, it was Darwin's only link to the outside world and was on the air for all but 34 hours in the coming weeks.