One of the most powerful storms in living memory struck Australia's Queensland coast this morning, obliterating houses and destroying sugar cane and banana farms, but sparing lives.

Cyclone Larry, a Category 5 storm, came ashore just south of the popular tourist resort of Cairns at 7am local time and tore into the small town of Innisfail, a centre of Queensland's sugar growing industry. No deaths were reported but around 30 people are known to have been injured.

Residents and emergency authorities said that 290kph (180mph) winds wrenched roofs from houses, demolished crops and left roads littered with powerlines and overturned cars. Tourists in Cairns sought shelter in hotels, roads were blocked and 100,000 people lost electricity.

The Australian army is expected in the region this evening to help the clear-up.

"I don't get scared much, but this is something to make any man tremble in his boots," Des Hensler, an Innisfail resident sheltering from the storm told local television. "There's a grey sheet of water, horizontal to the ground, and just taking everything in its path."

Paul Leyton, standing outside his roofless house, told Reuters: "She was howling like a banshee. The walls were getting sucked in and out and making an incredible sound."

Police and rescue workers said nearly half the houses in Innisfail, a town of 8,500 people, had been damaged. The town was also struck by powerful cyclones, the southern hemisphere's equivalent of a hurricane, in 1986 and 1918, when all but 12 houses were wiped out.

"We’ve even seen a few homes that you might as well say have been totally demolished. It looked like they’d exploded," Wayne Coutts, a director of the local emergency services, told reporters.

As Larry headed inland, weakening to a Category 2 cyclone, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, said the country had been lucky to escape without any fatalities.

"The damage to dwellings is very extensive," said Mr Howard. "Thank heavens it does not appear as though there have been any very serious injuries."

Mr Howard said he would visit the region shortly and that families who had lost their homes would receive an instant grant of A$1,000 (£417) per adult and A$400 (£167) per child.

Meteorologists said that Larry was of a similar size and intensity to Cyclone Tracy, which killed 71 people and flattened 70 per cent of the northern city of Darwin in 1974.

They also warned the battered people of Queensland that Cyclone Wati, the next storm in the season, is currently gathering strength and is expected to follow a similar path to Larry in the coming days.

Early estimates indicated that the storm had caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. A 45-minute hailstorm in Sydney in 1999 caused the country's biggest insured loss of A$2 billion (£833 million).

The storm's toll is likely to be felt most keenly by Australia's sugar and banana industries. The northern reaches of Queensland produce 25 per cent of the country's sugarcane and the entire banana crop. Up to 90 per cent of banana trees in the storm's path are believed to have been destroyed.

"We are the tropical fruit bowl of Australia. I would say every tree has been flattened," Neil Clarke, the Mayor of Innisfail, told ABC television. "It looks like an atomic bomb has hit the place."

Government scientists will also explore any damage to the coral of the Great Barrier Reef, which gets buffetted and torn to death by the rough seas and sediment caused during the region's November-April cyclone season. Dead coral takes between 10 and 20 years to replace.

But David Wachenfeld, director of science at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said that the small eye of the cyclone, just 50km (30 miles) across, meant that extensive damage was likely to be limited.

"The Great Barrier Reef is more than 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) long, so what you’re looking at here is a narrow band of damage going through the middle of a very large area," he told the Associated Press.

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