As the storm approaches Brisbane many are taking shelter in evacuation centres, but some are staying put
From John’s spot on the foreshores of the Redcliffe peninsula he can see dark clouds moving over Bramble Bay, obscuring and then revealing the distant towers of the Brisbane CBD.
It’s early Friday afternoon and the wind is steadily picking up, flapping the polyester floor of his tent.
The police have checked on him daily and council workers have urged him to seek refuge in one of the three evacuation centres in the Moreton Bay council area, as Tropical Cyclone Alfred threatens landfall for a second day in its delayed and circuitous path to south-east Queensland.
But John is planning on riding out the storm in his tent.
“I’m prepared, I’m ready, I’ll be staying here,” he says.
“Someone left me some sandbags, so I’ll put sandbags on each tent pole. I’ve got a timber bed in there and I’m 105kg. Seriously, if the tent collapses, I’ll just be trapped inside there until [the storm] passes.”
John is not the only rough sleeper who is opting not to head to an evacuation centre, despite the warnings. Just metres away in Pelican Park, Shane Moran is planning on seeing it out in his ute in the car park. Shane doesn’t want to go to an evacuation centre because he doesn’t “handle crowds very well”.
“Some people are going to go behind the buildings there, out of the wind,” he says, pointing to a service station and some apartment blocks on the Hornibrook Esplanade.
Shane had been living in rental accommodation at nearby Scarborough until about a year ago, when he could no longer afford the rent. The pair crack some bleak jokes about John being blown away in this tent and he continues the banter by asking for rich compensation for his “photoshoot”.
“Mate, what we need is a house,” Shane says.
A number of rough sleepers are refusing to accept accommodation, according to a Moreton Bay council spokesperson, who is imploring them to do so before it is too late.
“Rough sleepers will be risking their lives in cyclonic conditions if they don’t accept these offers and move soon,” she says.
“A cyclone brings gale force winds, making it dangerous for people to move around the city. The time will come when Council, SES or Emergency Services cannot assist residents as it is unsafe.”
Other homeless people have sought refuge in or near Moreton Bay’s evacuation centres. Like Cheryl Kelly. Cheryl is parked out the front of an evacuation centre in nearby Rothwell in a van she shares with her dog Georgie.
She is grateful for the support of the people running the evacuation centre, but she doesn’t want to shelter inside just yet.
“I’ve lost a lot of confidence,” she says.
“I look homeless and I don’t belong in the public and I’m putting myself down a lot, especially after you had your own home for six years and showering regularly, all the time.”
But Cheryl has taken advantage of a portable shower at the centre. “It was nice to wash your hair and everything,” she says.
Others can afford the kind of caravans that make life on the road more comfortable.
Linda Benge and her husband sold their family home in Regents Park after it copped more than $100,000 worth of damage in the 2022 flood. They bought a large motor home, and now flit between two caravan parks on the Redcliffe peninsula, counting down the days until they retire and can hit the road.
“We love it,” Linda says. “We absolutely love it.”
At least, she does under normal circumstances. On Friday, she’s more apprehensive.
“It’s the unknown, that’s what I’m worried about,” she says. “It’s the wind. I don’t know if it’s going to pick up the cars, whether it will pick up the motor home? Do we move it around for shelter?”
It isn’t just van and tent dwellers who have sought refuge in evacuation centres. Brisbane’s RNA showgrounds welcome many people from across the city and beyond for the Royal Queensland Show – or the Ekka, as everyone calls it – every August. Now its sturdy, red brick convention centre is being prepared for a very different kind of crowd.
As Alfred looms off the coast, the city council has designated the convention centre its sole refuge shelter. Here, people can ride out the storm, while flood evacuation centres used previously are not strong enough to withstand cyclones.
However, as of Friday morning, only a handful of people in the city of 2.7 million had taken up the offer.
Ruth sits alone on a bench in front in an empty courtyard in the RNA, a serene figure amid the largely deserted streets as most people heed the advice of authorities and stay indoors for another day of waiting out the weather.
She spent Thursday there as well but went to her home on the south side of the river after Alfred’s expected landfall was delayed.
“I’m in a suburb that has a lot of tall trees,” she says. “It’s beautiful, but not in a cyclone”.
In Brisbane, community service providers are also offering shelter specifically for those sleeping rough.
Micah Projects at Kurilpa Hall and the Emmanuel City Mission are sheltering more than 100 homeless residents. Both centres are packed with hastily assembled informal beds scattered around the floor.
Emmanuel has separated women and men in different parts of the building, and is offering people multiple cooked meals a day and has a volunteer registered nurse on call.
John Bragg says he was able to sleep at Emmanuel last night despite the crowding by sticking some bits of paper towel in his ears.
“If it wasn’t for these people, there’d be a lot of people on the street. You know, people die out there in weather like this,” he says.
“If we didn’t have places to go and people to support us, we’d be in a bit of a struggle, wouldn’t we?”
Amal, who has taken refuge in Kurilpa Hall, grew up in India, where he saw the damage cyclones can do.
He says India had been forced to dig “mass graves” for hundreds of poor people wiped out by wild weather in the early 2000s.
Emmanuel’s operational manager, Tim Noonan, sees the irony in the fact that the city’s homeless are much safer during the cyclone than they usually are, and they will have to return to the streets once the storm has passed.
“Normally, they live with uncertainty. But in this tragedy, they’ve got certainty,” he says.
“They’ve never been somewhere [where they were] looked after; [now] we’re allowed to care for them.
“We’ve got to care for them every day like this”.