Ada struck the Whitsundays as a Category 4 system on the evening of 17 January, its eye crossing the coast near Shute Harbour. Wind gusts were later estimated as high as 220 kilometres per hour. The island resorts, then among the jewels of Australian tourism, simply came apart. On Daydream Island the largest resort in the group was obliterated; on Hayman, South Molle, and Long islands the destruction was much the same, cabins flattened and facilities torn open to the sky. Nearly every building on Hook Island was lost. The boats that might have carried guests to safety were smashed at their moorings, and so hundreds of holidaymakers found themselves stranded on shattered islands with the storm still screaming around them. Four men sheltered on Hook Island for a week before help reached them.

Of the fourteen people Ada killed, eleven died on the water. The concrete fishing trawler Whakatane, a substantial vessel nearly seventeen metres long, vanished on a run from Mackay toward Townsville with seven people aboard. The search was called off on 26 January, about the time wreckage believed to be hers washed up near Long Island. Seven names, one boat, swallowed by a sea that left almost nothing to bury. Closer to shore, five men went out into the teeth of the storm to secure a boat anchored off Hayman Island and were reported missing. These were the quiet catastrophes that the wider story of ruined resorts can obscure: not statistics, but fishermen and boat hands, husbands and sons, lost in water that gave no warning and granted no mercy.

On the mainland, Ada traded wind for water. Rainfall totals reaching as high as 1,250 millimetres sent rivers surging between Bowen and Mackay, overtopping a bridge by three metres and cutting Proserpine and Airlie Beach off from the world for days. Roads disappeared. Hundreds of motorists were marooned on a long stretch of the Bruce Highway. In the small coastal towns the storm had already done its work: it demolished a motel and the handful of houses at Shute Harbour, flattened 85 percent of the homes in Airlie Beach, and wrecked nearly all of Cannonvale's two hundred houses. Two more people drowned in the flooded country inland, one of them a soldier sent to help. Australian Army units and Air Force aircraft converged on the islands and lifted roughly 500 stranded people to safety, while Navy boats carried the injured to hospitals.

Ada had exposed something dangerous: the warning system had failed the people who needed it most, and the lesson did not go unlearned. The disaster became the impetus for far better cyclone-awareness programs, work later credited with saving lives when the next storms came. The name Ada was retired from Australia's cyclone list, a small formal acknowledgement of how much it had taken. The resorts clawed their way back, Hayman and Daydream reopening within the year, but the wound stayed in the region's memory. For half a century the fourteen dead went without a public marker. Then, on 18 January 2020, the fiftieth anniversary, a community that had not forgotten unveiled a stone monument at Airlie Beach, 1.7 metres tall and carved with all fourteen names, before a crowd of two hundred. Ada is still called a defining event in the Whitsundays. The memorial makes sure it is remembered as a human one.