Cyclone season checklist for Queensland businesses.

Queensland's cyclone season runs from November to April. The work that saves a business is rarely done during the warning. It is done in October. This is the sequence we use with clients from Cairns to the Gold Coast.

Before the season starts (October)

• Confirm your insurance covers the event and the consequences, not only the building.
• Photograph and inventory stock, plant and fit-out. Store the file off site or in the cloud.
• Test the generator under load. An untested generator is a decoration.
• Agree your closure trigger in writing: what warning level closes the site, and who calls it.
• Check your staff contact list dials. Every number, once a year.
• Ask your two most critical suppliers what their plan is. Their outage becomes your outage.

72 hours out

Move stock off the floor. Bring forward the deliveries you will need afterwards and cancel the ones you won't. Tell customers your closure position while they are still calm, because it saves fifty phone calls later.

48 hours out

• Fuel vehicles and the generator. Fuel gets scarce quickly.
• Back up systems and confirm the backup restores. Untested backups fail at the worst time.
• Secure loose material on site. The insurance claim often turns on this.
• Brief staff on the closure decision and how they will be told to return.

24 hours out and during

People off site. One nominated contact. One channel, usually a group SMS, because mobile data and internet tend to fail before voice does. Nobody attends site during the event to check on anything.

Day three is the part people underestimate

Most Queensland businesses cope with the cyclone itself. The week afterwards is what breaks them: power still out, EFTPOS down, staff unable to get in, a supplier who can't deliver and an insurer asking for documentation nobody took. Write that week into the plan as well as the storm.

"The event lasts hours. The disruption lasts a fortnight."

Worked example: a Cairns hardware supplier's 2025 season

A 22-person building supplies yard in Cairns ran the full checklist ahead of a category 3 system that tracked close to the coast in February. The generator, tested in October, ran the cold room and the EFTPOS network for 30 hours. Because the manager had pre-agreed a closure trigger with the owner, staff were sent home 18 hours before landfall rather than waiting for a phone call that might not have got through once mobile networks degraded. The yard reopened on day two at reduced hours and full trade resumed on day five. A neighbouring yard that had not tested its generator lost a full pallet of frozen concrete additive and three days of trade waiting on a technician, a loss the owner estimated at close to $19,000 once wasted deliveries and casual wages were included.

Common mistakes that cost money

• Assuming the generator will start because it did last time. Fuel goes stale, batteries fail and loads change. Test it under real load every October.
• Waiting for an official warning before fuelling vehicles. By the time a cyclone warning is issued, servo queues are already an hour long and some run dry.
• Relying on a single mobile carrier for the staff contact list. Telstra, Optus and TPG networks fail independently during severe weather, so a call tree that only works on one network leaves gaps.
• Not deciding in advance who can authorise a closure. A business that waits for the owner to be reachable loses the exact hours it needed to prepare.
• Forgetting that suppliers and freight partners have their own outages. A supplier two hundred kilometres inland can still leave you without stock if their own site loses power.

What good preparation looks like

A well-prepared Queensland business can tell you, without checking a document, who calls the closure, how staff will be told to come back, and how long the cold chain or backup power will last. The written checklist exists, but by October it has usually been run through as muscle memory rather than read for the first time in a warning.

If flooding is your bigger exposure, our flood recovery checklist covers what happens once the water goes down, and our business continuity plan template shows how to fold this checklist into a wider plan.

How much warning do Queensland businesses usually get before a cyclone?

The Bureau of Meteorology typically issues a cyclone watch 48 hours before gales are expected and a warning at 24 hours, but tracks can shift quickly and coastal businesses should treat the watch stage as the trigger for action rather than the warning. Systems that intensify rapidly close to the coast can leave less than a day between warning and impact.

Should I close my business before a cyclone warning is issued?

If your closure trigger is written down and tied to a warning category rather than a feeling, you avoid the two failure modes we see most: closing too early and losing avoidable trade, or waiting too long and putting staff on the road during deteriorating conditions. Most Queensland businesses set their trigger at the watch stage for pre-closure tasks and the warning stage for actual closure.

How long does power usually stay off after a cyclone in Queensland?

It varies enormously by location and damage extent. Suburban Brisbane outages after a severe storm are often restored within 24 to 48 hours, while regional and North Queensland outages after direct cyclone impact have run seven to ten days in past seasons where infrastructure damage was extensive. Plan your fuel and generator capacity around the worse case for your area, not the best case.