 Everybody's ready? Okay. The most recent tracking data from the Bureau tells us that Cyclone Iazzi is now on track to cross land this evening somewhere between Innisfail and Cardwell. The Bureau believes that this location is within a 30 kilometre degree of accuracy. So we are very close now to narrowing down where we are most likely to see this tropical cyclone cross the coast. The most recent posting on the Bureau website I think gives a very good idea of what's actually happening up there and I couldn't do better than read it to you and I think it gives you a sense of just how serious this event is. So this is what you will find on the Bureau of Meteorology website this morning. Severe tropical cyclone Iazzi is a large and very powerful tropical cyclone and poses an extremely serious threat to life and property within the warning area especially between Cairns and Townsville. This impact is likely to be more life-threatening than any experienced during recent generations. By way of comparison the last category 5 cyclone to cross the coast of Queensland was in 1918. So this is an event that we have no recent experience of. This also means that we will see very, very high seas and the Bureau has also issued a warning for dangerous swells all the way down to the Sunshine Coast. So can I particularly stress while we have so much of our emergency response focused in North Queensland and Far North Queensland we don't need people doing stupid things around surf on places like Sunshine Coast beaches. These are dangerous swells. The Bureau has issued a warning and they are only going to get more dangerous in the next 24 hours all the way down the coast to the Sunshine Coast. The other important message this morning is to say to those communities to the west of the area between Cairns and Townsville that they need to be equally prepared. The cyclone is looking like it will be around Georgetown as a category 3 cyclone around 8am tomorrow morning. So as this cyclone moves across the coast it will slow down a little but it will still be a very serious cyclone category 3 in towns like Georgetown which normally you would never see a cyclone in. So the table lands, the hinterland and then towns to the west need to start preparing and understanding that this event will affect them and give cyclonic conditions. The cyclone has now passed over the Bureau of Meteorologies monitoring station on Willis Island. Thankfully there was a decision made yesterday to evacuate the four staff who look after Willis Island. All of the measuring equipment and radar equipment has been taken out by the cyclone and we now have no monitoring data from Willis Island. However satellite images and others are still fine. Cairns and Townsville airports are now closed although Mackay Airport is continuing to operate although it may close sometime in the next 24 hours. We already have some power outages around the air and we expect to see more in the coming hours. Some of the early winds from this cyclone are starting to reach the coast and we have some reports out of air of winds strong enough to have taken a number of large trees out already. So the beginning of this cyclone's events has already started and some of the communities in this Cairns to Townsville stretch are starting to see the effects or the air of course is some outside of Townsville. We now have approximately nine and a half thousand people in 20 evacuation centres between Cairns and Townsville. Most of them in Cairns or Townsville but another large one in Innisfail. We are looking to, there is still some spare capacity in some of these centres and I said this morning the window was still open and closing. It is still a little crack of light there and there is still some last minute opportunities. People who are in any of those areas that might experience flooding should be looking at their absolutely last chance. The next time I'm doing an update there will be no further opportunities for people to move. Those people who are not in an inundation area please do not go to the evacuation centres. You are safer in your own home and you will only take up space from people who cannot be in their own homes or the home of a friend. So please only go to the evacuation centres if you are firstly in a flood or inundation area and you are not able to find accommodation with a friend or a family member. Finally I was asked some questions this morning about the severity of the patients who were transferred overnight in the evacuation of Cannes Hospital. I can tell you that of the 250 patients eight of them were adult ICU fully ventilated patients. There were 16 special care babies, two of whom were intensive care unit babies. There were numerous other patients who were on stretches and couldn't walk and many of them needed oxygen. The last plane from that evacuation will arrive at midday today. It's a Royal Flying Doctors service plane and it will be carrying four of those special care babies. So the evacuation will be complete in about half an hour's time when four neonatal patients arrive here in Brisbane. Otherwise all of those other patients are now located in their hospitals. In many cases wherever possible parents were accompanying children who were relocated and efforts will be made by all of those receiving hospitals to stay in touch with families who have been left behind in Cannes about the welfare of your loved one as they settle into the new hospital. I might invite Ian if you wanted to. Premier thank you. My message and the only message I wish to give at this time is to those people who are still staying in the areas affected by storm tide. This morning at about nine o'clock the Bureau put out another series of figures and to give you some idea of the importance of people evacuating from those areas the figures for Cardwell for the storm size sorry the storm tide is approximately six and a half to seven metres above the highest normal tide. So that means a person who lives in that area who knows where the highest tide level is for that area they can expect water above that through the storm surge of up to 20 feet six and a half to seven metres above that normal highest tide. People need to understand that their lives and their property are in danger but it is their lives that we are primarily focused on. They have a very small window of opportunity they should leave now and go and find shelter with friends or family or if they're able to get to an evacuation shelter or shelter site they should arrive there in the next half hour to hour. How will that water arrive as a way? No it will gradually build up for a number of hours as the tide rises to nine o'clock tonight and as the cyclone arrives on the coast it will be a gradual rise but there is also a wave height above that adds to that. Now it's not going to be, I'm not going to go into technicalities of it because believe me it is quite technical but there are wave heights that will increase that but generally that level is what people can expect at Cardwell. In Townsville the height is around the three metre mark that we've been given this morning. Now the local government disaster management groups and the district disaster management groups are aware of those figures and have been advising people in those areas mandantly to evacuate and that's been happening. There is this very small window of opportunity which is left before it gets too dangerous to travel at all and common sense will play a big part in this but those people need to leave now. Can I just say sorry in terms of how quickly Ian's right it will come up gradually but over a period of three hours so we're not talking 24 hours it will go to its peak within a period of about three hours so it will be quite rapidly moving water. What advice have you given your emergency services at what point of the cyclone do they pull out and stop trying to help people? Emergency service workers will continue to answer calls and help people for as long as it is safe to do so and that will depend on where they are, where the call out is to, how far they might have to travel and what is prevailing in that part of town at that time but it will reach a point in every single one of these centres where there will come a time when they simply will not be able to respond. Obviously that will be different in Cairns than it is in Cardwell and they'll have to make a judgement on what the call out is and the degree of severity and the risk to themselves but the clear advice to our emergency workers is we need them, not only today we need them tomorrow and the weeks and months ahead and we don't need them putting their own lives at serious risk. They obviously take a degree of risk in all of their work but their clear instruction is not to risk their lives unnecessarily. Obviously the velocity of the wind on Willis Island is the last measurement there before the equipment obviously going down. I'm sorry we don't have that information but we can actually get it and we'll let you know at the next time. Is that alarming that the equipment did fail because that would indicate a massive storm as you know it is but surely that is capable of measuring category 5 cyclones so what are we facing now? The recent advice from the Bureau indicates that the wind gusts near the centre of the cyclone are now measured at 295 kilometres an hour. So I'm trying to know when people won't be able to get SES assistance. As I said it will differ in every place and it will be a case by case judgement. Obviously if someone's outside the fire station and you can reach them you'll do that but you won't be travelling 30 kilometres across town when you've got 6 metres of water so every case will be different but people do need to prepare for the reality that once we get to winds of 295 kilometres an hour nobody will be moving anywhere. Will there be any relaxing about that? I think it's important to understand here that these evacuation centres are going to be very full. Many of them will not provide beds because it's simply not possible to do so and they will every single space will be used to preserve human life. I do understand just what a painful decision this is but if you can imagine a centre that's not, some of these are school halls with a thousand people in them. It is just simply not possible to accommodate pets in those circumstances and I'd hate to be making that decision and I understand how painful it is but right now we have to put human life absolutely first. From your personal point of view what catastrophe is facing the people up north? What is the worst thing to your mind that they have to go through? Look I think it's very hard to even contemplate the unbearable circumstances that many families are going to be facing tonight. We need to understand that they will be in very frightening circumstances. They will be for the most part going through cyclonic winds of up to 300 kilometres an hour to wrench or rain and many of them will do that without any electricity, without any mobile telecommunications and some of them may well be doing it with parts of their roof coming off. As Deputy Commissioner said this morning, people who are bunkered in their house are safer in their house even if parts or all of the roof come off. I know it will be raining on them but going out into those winds even if it seems sensible is just the most dangerous thing to do. So people do need to prepare themselves and particularly their children for something that will be quite frightening. But everything that can be done is being done and the safest place right now given it is not possible for most people now to leave town, the safest place is to be in their homes in the smallest room in the house, whether that is your toilet, your bathroom, a laundry the smallest room in your house will be the most structurally sound and that is where you should take your family when these winds really escalate. I don't know that off by heart, sorry Chris. I think it is about 300 kilometres but I would have to come back to you on that. Given the size and the ferocity of this event are you confident you have got enough resources in place to go in after it is passed to help people who are obviously going to leave? There will never be enough resources that we can get in as quickly as we need to but the reality is we have planned for as many as humanly possible to go in straight after this, the right types of resources and that is critical so people with particular skills the rapid assessment teams, the aircraft that can do photography of the area to give us a rapid assessment of the damage we have even just in the process now of making a request to the Australian Navy to bring their heavy lift supply shifts up off the coast so that we can use them as bases if necessary to undertake our work from in reinstating services and providing support to the communities that are damaged. How did that work? How did that work from the Navy ships? Well it's just like occurred when they had the tsunami off Indonesia the Navy ships parked off the coast and we use those as the bases to actually work from with the helicopters and the accommodation that's available to us on those aircraft. That's in the event that there may be vehicles that can be used as headquarters or base. For example, Ergon's head office is in Townsville and there are contingencies being put in place but there may need to be another venue put in place so the critical services that we will focus on day one and every day beyond that obviously are electricity, telecommunications water and obviously food supplies and medical services so they are all right now in addition to responding, we have a team here that have been working for the last three days to ensure that everybody who can be on alert and ready to deploy are on alert. So we've got people on standby literally right across Queensland ready to go in the minute it's safe to do so. And the reality is that some people will decide in opposition to all the very very best advice some people will say no I am not leaving. The problem that police and emergency service workers have in that situation is how much time do they spend looking after one person as opposed to going down the street and dealing with the 30 other people who are prepared to leave and notify. So the issue is for us it's about making a choice of priorities about do you try and look after that one person or do you try and help the many who are prepared to comply. That is obviously a very last resort and with the huge numbers of persons that we are dealing with I doubt whether that is occurring. What about hard to access places such as Palm Island? Have you had enough time to adequately evacuate them? We're not evacuating people off Palm Island. The Palm Island council has worked to ensure that anyone in a low-lying area has been relocated to a house in a higher area. Palm Island is a council that is ready for this event. It will be one of the islands that experiences some very early symptoms of the cyclone because it's just that bit offshore. Without doubt because it's now south of where the cyclone is going to hit it's those areas to the south that will feel the brunt of some of the stronger winds and particularly the storm surge. So all the planning that can be done on Palm Island for that storm surge has been done. I'm very confident the council has done a good job in alerting people. It is a very small community and that does mean that you can just about talk to everybody. Mackay airport is still open and they will continue to make assessments. At the moment they can still safely in their view take flights in and out. We'll have to wait and see when the winds get to a certain point the airport will make a decision but at this stage it's still open and flights are still anticipated for some time. In terms of ships all ships have left the area and have been doing that over the past few days so whether they're large coal ships or any other ship they've been moving south over the last couple of days so we don't anticipate any ships out there in these circumstances. They've been well warned and they've made it their business to get as far away as they can. I do, I don't have it right on me here but look it's roughly about half and half in Cairns and Townsville. I think there are about 500 people in the Innisfail facility and I can get you some numbers on that. Premier the Cairns mess is only two of the evacuations and is there cyclone rated? How confident are you that the other ones will be safe for these people to move? The judgement that has to be made here and that's why we're saying only those people who are in flood prone, low line coastal areas should move to the evacuation centres is you are less safe if you are in the path of a very significant storm surge. All the evidence from these events around the world tell us that people and their lives are at more risk from storm surge water than they are from cyclonic winds. That doesn't mean there's no risk from the winds and yes some of the people in evacuation centres may well face some very difficult circumstances in the centres. We are indicating they should move to there because they're at less risk, not no risk, less risk than if they stayed in the path of the storm surge waters which as you've heard in some places could be as high as six or seven metres. Clearly people have to be got out of that environment. Premier is the EPA still ten o'clock tonight? At this stage yes and we'll up your date you through the day. What was committed to after cyclone Larry was that as we built large public infrastructure that lent itself to being capable of taking a large number of people that would be done at a category 5 cyclone level. That has happened in Innisfail State High School the centre that is accommodating 500 people right now is a category 5 shelter and that was as a result of that rebuild. Red Lynch State School which is also accommodating I think close to a thousand people. Built and finished at the end of last year is a category 5 shelter and is accommodating a thousand people. The Hall at the Babinda RSL is a category 5 shelter. So that's three that have been done in five years. The commitment was as we build the things that are necessary like school halls where people could take shelter we will build them to a category 5 level. But that you can't accommodate 75,000 people in these sorts of shelters. That could never happen. You always need to expect that some people will be sheltering in their own homes. Some evacuation centres have reached capacity but in both Cairns, Townsville and Innisfail there are still others that do have capacity. Earlville shopping centre in Cairns still has significant capacity. If you can imagine spending the night in the shopping centre it's not going to be very comfortable but if you are in the path of a tidal surge it is still a safer place to be. But if you can be in your own home that is where you should stay.