Tropical Cyclone Debbie tore through parts of north Queensland during an agonising 16 hours on March 28, 2017.
But almost one year on, residents are still cleaning up the mess.
Debbie may not have been Australia's biggest cyclone, but it was one of the most damaging.
The category four system, with its wind gusts of more than 250km/hr, and the subsequent low caused more than $1.7 billion in damage.
Insurance Council of Australia general manager Campbell Fuller said it was the second-most expensive cyclone to ever hit the country.
"It's second only to Cyclone Tracey in terms of the extent of property damage," he told AAP.
The Whitsunday region bore the brunt of Debbie's rage, but Mr Fuller said the reason its impact was larger than some category five cyclones was because the weather system then travelled down the eastern Australian coastline.
"Debbie actually affected NSW, Queensland and Victoria before it gave New Zealand a smack," he said.
"This has been an extraordinary event."
Whitsunday Regional Council mayor Andrew Willcox said although most companies were back up and running, it was "certainly not business as usual".
Mr Willcox said the tourist hotspot had experienced a decline in visitor numbers and one year on they were only just starting to return.
"It's not quite as good as what it was before the cyclone, but it is still a magical area," he told AAP.
"If you hadn't seen it before you wouldn't know."
The Insurance Council of Australia estimates 95 per cent of all residential building claims have been finalised.
But Proserpine business owner Leah Borghero, who runs the A&A Motel with her husband, said there had been a lot of problems.
"The clean up of the actual town is still continuing which is a little bit disappointing for a lot of people," she told AAP.
"There are still tarps on roofs."
But Mr Fuller said one of the reasons some homes had not been fixed was because people had opted for cash settlements, meaning they had to do repairs themselves.
More than half of all buildings in the Whitsunday region were also built before the national cyclone code came into effect in 1984.
Mr Fuller said the remoteness of the area and difficulty of getting tradespeople made repairs more difficult.
"Despite all those challenges, the insurance industry is running 20 to 25 per cent ahead of the repair curve you would typically see of a disaster of this kind," he said.
Mr Willcox's home has only recently been finished after it was damaged in Tropical Cyclone Debbie.
The mayor said although it had been a frustrating process, it was one of the trade-offs for living in paradise.
"If at the end of the day we have a cyclone occasionally, you're much much better off than you ever would be living in Sydney," he said.
Mr Willcox said although the community were well-prepared for Debbie, there had been plenty of learnings.
"What people have got to realise is the magnitude of this event," he said.
"I've got 24,000sq km of country that I look after and every square centimetre of that was impacted in some way."
Whitsunday Regional Council staff have produced a road to recovery video that will be aired on the Airlie Beach foreshore on the one-year anniversary next Wednesday.
Australian Associated Press
