Cyclone batters Australia's northwest

Chris is moving slowly in a south-southwesterly direction

MARBLE BAR, Australia -- Cyclone Chris, one of the most powerful storms to hit Australia is rampaging through the country's sparsely populated northwest, with wind gusts of up to 200 kilometers per hour (125 miles per hour) battering remote communities.

The center of cyclone has passed to the south-west of Port Hedland, a mining town and port of 14,000 people, and is now threatening the much smaller communities of Marble Bar, Tom Price and Nullagine, according to Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.

The nearest major metropolitan center to the cyclone is Perth, the capital of Western Australia, nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) to the south.

While some damage to a roadhouse and cattle properties has been reported, so far there has been no loss of life or serious injury.

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The cyclone, which was downgraded to a category 4 once it hit land, is currently moving south-southwest at 12 kilometers (8 miles) an hour.

Meteorologists said the cyclone would weaken as it moves across land but gale force winds were expected to continue in Marble Bar and surrounding areas for the next 12 hours.

Offshore oil production has so far been unaffected by the cyclone, which is easily as powerful as the one which destroyed the northern tropical city of Darwin in 1976.

Chris is the first tropical storm of the southern hemisphere summer cyclone season on the northwest Australian coast.

The season usually ends in March or April.

On Tuesday, torrential rain, flash floods and landslides caused havoc along Australia's more heavily populated east coast, more than 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) away.

The downpour followed devastating bush fires over the Christmas and New Year period which burnt more than 500,000 hectares of bush land.