DARWIN, Australia — Cyclone Fina wrought havoc on the Northern Territory capital with Category 3 winds late Saturday, uprooting trees, flooding streets, and leaving about 19,000 customers without power. As it entered the Timor Sea, the system intensified to a Category 4 storm over open water, fueled by warm sea-surface temperatures after pummeling Darwin on Saturday, Nov. 22, 2025.
Cyclone Fina, with winds of up to 205 kph (127 mph) and heavy rain, skirted between Darwin and the Tiwi Islands, flooding roads but causing no injuries, authorities said in a Reuters report. Meteorologists at the Bureau of Meteorology said it is the fiercest cyclone to hit Darwin since the devastating Cyclone Tracy in 1974.
Throughout Darwin, large trees were felled across roads, traffic lights were ripped from their posts, and sheets of roofing lay sprawled across front yards as residents crawled out of shelters. A section of the roof at Royal Darwin Hospital collapsed, raining bricks and water into a corridor but missing the operating theatres and intensive care units, according to ABC News.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro said about 19,000 homes and businesses lost power, but praised Territorians for heeding warnings and assisting neighbours in clearing debris. “This is a cyclone that we have never recorded before because we have a territory that was united and prepared,” she said, according to Al Jazeera — “and the consequence of that again is minimal impact and nil injuries.
Power and Water Corporation said crews stopped work overnight because of the winds, which made it too dangerous to continue, but were working through Sunday to restore power, with hospitals, aged-care centres, and key communications towers prioritised. Residents were told to avoid downed lines and to assume that every cable was live as they wound through streets littered with branches and debris.
Darwin International Airport, which closed before the storm struck, canceled or diverted dozens of flights, leaving passengers stranded as terminal roofs rattled in the gale. The airport reopened on Sunday on a limited basis following safety inspections. Schools and many businesses planned to reopen after damage assessments were completed.
With Darwin no longer in the warning zone, Cyclone Fina is moving west-southwest across the Timor Sea as a Category 4 system, bringing dangerous winds and seas to isolated communities along the coasts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Heavy rain and destructive gusts could continue into Monday, the Bureau of Meteorology warned.
Severe Tropical Cyclone Fina is the most powerful cyclone to sweep directly over Darwin since Cyclone Tracy destroyed the city in 1974, and is stronger than Cyclone Marcus, which was a Category 2 when it passed through in 2018. Most contemporary homes held up well, emergency managers said, with the worst impacts centered on downed trees and power lines, and on older or poorly maintained structures.
The trauma of Cyclone Tracy, which hit on Christmas Day morning in 1974 and killed 66 people and destroyed around 80 percent of the city’s buildings, was never far from the minds of Darwin residents. It flattened entire suburbs and forced the mass evacuation of tens of thousands of residents, Australian disaster researchers said in a historical summary.
In the decades since, Darwin has been rebuilt to far stricter “cyclone code” standards, with extensive use of stronger roofing connections, wall bracing, and more anchoring to slabs. “Homes constructed after 1975 in cyclone-prone areas are built to withstand a mid-range Category 4 system,” according to advice published on the Northern Territory’s Secure NT website by territory emergency planners.
That framework was put to the test in March 2018, when Cyclone Marcus, a Category 2 weather system, ripped through Darwin, felling thousands of trees and bringing down more than 400 powerlines. Tens of thousands of properties lost power, and boil-water advisories were issued across the city, according to contemporaneous reports on the storm.
Strong cyclones typically develop in December or January in northern Australia. Cyclone Fina, however, became a Category 3 storm in November, which The Guardian said was the strongest such cyclone to do so in Australian waters in 20 years. Warming oceans, climate scientists say, would be expected to increase the proportion of the most powerful tropical cyclones worldwide, even if the total number of storms stayed about the same.
In the days before the system reached land, the Bureau of Meteorology and emergency services called on Top End residents to “tie down their houses as best they can” and to prepare cyclone kits, according to an ABC News preparedness article noting how early this start to the cyclone season had been. Repeated across radio, television, and social media, those messages are now credited with the relatively low number of injuries and the lack of chaos during the storm.
For Darwin, Cyclone Fina was both a trial and an alarm: evidence that decades of stronger building codes and disaster planning can dull the worst blows, but also an alert that another Tracy-scale event is still conceivable. As the storm spins away, residents said attention is shifting to clearing streets, restoring power, and watching the skies.
