Global News published this video item, entitled “Cyclone Yasa flood roads, bridges as storm brings torrential rains” – below is their description.
Homes were destroyed and crops flattened in Fiji on Thursday into Friday after Cyclone Yasa brought torrential rains and hurricane-force winds to the country.
The Pacific archipelago’s government had declared a state of natural disaster due to the storm and ordered one million people to seek shelter.
Yasa made landfall as a category five storm over Bua Province, cutting power to some areas and blocking roads due to fallen trees and flash flooding.
In meteorology, a cyclone is a large scale air mass that rotates around a strong center of low atmospheric pressure. Cyclones are characterized by inward spiraling winds that rotate about a zone of low pressure and typically bring winds, rain, high waves and storm surges to the areas they pass.
In the Atlantic and the northeastern Pacific oceans, a tropical cyclone is generally referred to as a hurricane (from the name of the ancient Central American deity of wind, Huracan), in the Indian and south Pacific oceans it is called a cyclone, and in the northwestern Pacific it is called a typhoon.
Fiji, officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean about 1,100 nautical miles (2,000 km; 1,300 mi) northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists of an archipelago of more than 330 islands—of which about 110 are permanently inhabited—and more than 500 islets, amounting to a total land area of about 18,300 square kilometres (7,100 sq mi). The most outlying island is Ono-i-Lau. 87% of the total population of 883,483 live on the two major islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu.
Humans have lived in Fiji since the second millennium BC—first Austronesians and later Melanesians, with some Polynesian influences. A military government declared a Republic in 1987 following a series of coups d’état.
Fiji has one of the most developed economies in the Pacific through its abundant forest, mineral, and fish resources. The currency is the Fijian dollar, with the main sources of foreign exchange being the tourist industry, remittances from Fijians working abroad, bottled water exports, and sugar cane.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth’s oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east
