Giant cyclone pounds Australia coast; no deaths

Cyclone Yasi, packing winds of up to 300 km (186 miles) an hour near its core, came ashore along hundreds of kilometers of coastline in Queensland state.

Mines, rail lines and coal ports have been shut, with officials warning the storm could drive far inland, hitting mining areas struggling to recover from recent devastating floods.

Queensland accounts for about a fifth of Australia's economy and 90 percent of its steelmaking coal exports but the extent of the damage might not be known for many hours.

The eye of the cyclone crossed the coast close to the tourist town of Mission Beach at around midnight.

"It sounds like a roaring train going over the top of the house. There are trees cracking outside," Hayley Leonard told Seven Network television from a concrete bunker beneath her home in the town of Innisfail.

Despite the ferocity of the cyclone, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said there had been no reports of deaths.

"What I'm very relieved about is that we have yet to hear any reports from any police or any other source of any serious injury or fatality," Bligh told Sky TV.

She said evacuation centers, where more than 10,000 people had sheltered across the state, had not reported structural damage.

Major towns in the area including Cairns and Townsville appeared to escape the full brunt of the storm, but Bligh said "devastating damage" was expected in smaller communities.

Power was cut in the western side of Cairns and a power official said more than 170,000 residents were without power.

Yasi was rated a maximum-strength category five storm and drew comparisons with Hurricane Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans in 2005.

It has been downgraded to a category two storm as it moves inland. But its core remained very destructive, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

Almost everyone in the storm zone was bunkered down at home or in cyclone shelters. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated in the hours before the storm struck.

A Bureau of Meteorology spokesman said a storm surge of two meters (six feet) above the normal level of the tide had inundated one stretch of coast but reporters said the surges were not as severe as feared.