Disruption, devastation and destruction, the three words which epitomise the wake left by Cyclone Seroja.

Gale force winds of more than 170 kilometres an hour tore the townships of Kalbarri, Binnu, and Northampton to shreds.

The trail of destruction included:

• More than 8000 properties assessed by the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES)
• Almost 2100 sustained serious structural damage
• 1117 residential homes damaged and 306 of those labelled ‘uninhabitable’

For a small country town like Kalbarri with a 1500-strong community, having over 300 homes destroyed by a category three cyclone was simply heartbreaking.

“We had all those things that you see further north, people cleaning their yards, putting things away, and we’re trying to get home to people, put your outdoor furniture away, get your pot plants in,” Lyn Symmons, of the DFES said.

“On the Sunday night when the cyclone hit, it was something we’d never experienced or expected to experience.

“It was absolutely terrible, you could hear houses losing their roofs, and the roofs going through the air and then crashing into another house."

“I remember, when I was a young bloke I saw the images of Cyclone Tracy in Darwin, it was like that.

“Just roofs off houses, power poles everywhere, the entanglement of power lines, it was like a redback spider’s nest in those streets.

“So those streets were impenetrable by cars, even now there’s not a leaf to be seen on a tree in Kalbarri."

“For the first three days most of our time was spent looking for dead people. It was just amazing that we didn’t find anybody.”

While the townsfolk of Kalbarri were able to escape with no lives lost, many were left with cuts and abrasions due to several hundred tonnes of tin being torn from every surface imaginable.

Many houses also losing their structural integrity, as they were not built to withstand a cyclone of this intensity.

With the dense, thick cloud coverage swelling for days after the storm, and the power lines ripped from the ground, mobile phone service and internet was down for three days.

“It was amazing to be without technology, and I’ve lost track of time, because there was so much flowing and so much happening and we had to respond to things so rapidly,” Symmons recalled.

“There were just little things, you’d need an electrical connection, and someone would say, ‘let’s take a photo on a mobile phone and we’ll text it’, and we’d all laugh, because you couldn’t. You couldn’t use your mobile phone.

“Our satellite phones wouldn’t work, so there was no power, no phone, no landlines, no satellite phones, so we didn’t really know what happened to the rest of the world.

“So we didn’t know about Northampton or the other places, so the isolation was pretty bad, and something that we had to overcome.”

The town banded together, with help from the police, fire brigade, SES and courier sea search team, all of whom played a role in piecing Kalbari back together.

“The first week in the fire brigade the guys were cooked. They were absolutely cooked working,” Symmons said.

“Sixteen hour days for the first week. So four volunteer firefighters from Carnarvon came down, gave us a rest for the weekend, just covering our road crash rescue and fire response.”

Now, albeit slowly, the town is beginning to recover.

“You’d hear a story and think, ‘that’s as bad as it’s going to get’, and then you’d hear another story which was worse… they all blended in to one another in the end,” Symmons explained.

“Some people lost their home, and in a little country town everyone’s your friend or somebody you know, so that was heartbreaking on its own.”

“But then to see the businesses that were impacted, big resorts with their roofs gone, buildings that were once two storey, and if you didn’t know better you’d think they were one storey, and the top level was completely gone."

“More elderly people, people in their 70’s and 80’s seem to be so resilient, I spoke to a fella who was standing in the street off with the fairies, and I said ‘you alright, Phil’? And he said ‘yeah, we’re alright’, and he’d lost his top roof and they were living downstairs.

“And I said ‘what are you going to do if it rains, Phil?’ and he said, ‘oh, we’ll just move away from the stairwell a little bit’.

“And I don’t think it really impacted people even up to week four, people were still standing in the street giving each other a hug, it was pretty emotional.”

But, youngsters in these townships have just received a glimmer of hope after a visit from the West Coast Eagles community team.

“Look, just for the kids at Northampton, Binnu and Kalbarri to have a footy coaching clinic, that alone even beside the fact that we had a cyclone, is awesome in a little country town,” Symmons smiled.

“To know that such a big organisation has got the heart to come all that way, 600 kilometres from Perth, it’s no mean feat to get there, and then logistically getting the crew up there and all the gear

“And then to put on clinics and fundraisers after, it was heart-warming.

“It goes to show that West Australians are a pretty good mob.”