After caus­ing dam­age at least 23 deaths in the Solomon Islands on April 5, the ini­tial­ly rat­ed cat­e­go­ry five Trop­i­cal Cyclone Ita with winds of 230km/h came ashore near Cook­town late on Fri­day April the 11th in Far North Queensland.

Dale McCar­ty VK4DMC reports that no Wire­less Insti­tute Civ­il Emer­gency Net­work (WICEN) acti­va­tion has occurred so far.
 
He said fre­quen­cies were con­stant­ly mon­i­tored and many of the Far North Queens­land hams checked in to see how oth­ers are faring.

The fre­quen­cies 7.088 MHz and 3.588 MHz were used until the cyclone, which had been down­grad­ed to a cat­e­go­ry 1, con­tin­ued to move south with strong winds and flooding.

Cook­town had about 50 build­ings dam­aged anoth­er five writ­ten off, trees snapped in half, road were blocked, pow­er and com­mu­ni­ca­tions were affect­ed. The worst-hit areas could with­out elec­tric­i­ty for some time until flood waters sub­side and repair crews are available. 

The strong winds and tor­ren­tial rain moved south to cause more dam­age. Sug­ar cane and banana crops were flat­tened. An esti­mat­ed $1 mil­lion in dam­age has been caused.

The pop­u­la­tion were well pre­pared for cyclones, but with Ita being rat­ed at cat­e­go­ry 5, many took refuge in com­mu­ni­ty shel­ters. The mobile phone ser­vice remained most­ly intact and fibre optic cables pro­vid­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion with some areas.

Radio Aus­tralia acti­vat­ed its pur­pose built short­wave out­let in Shep­par­ton Vic­to­ria to beam the lat­est cyclone infor­ma­tion into Queens­land thou­sands of kilo­me­tres to its north.

Trop­i­cal Cyclone Ita has formed over the north­ern Coral Sea to engulf the Solomon Islands which has at least 23 peo­ple dead, about 30 peo­ple miss­ing, and has left 49,000 homeless.

The coun­try also felt a 7.6‑magnitude earth­quake 96 kilo­me­tres south-south­east of the provin­cial cap­i­tal of Kiraki­ra, but it caused min­i­mal damage.