BRISBANE, Australia—Tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate their homes by March 1 and hundreds of thousands more were told to prepare to flee as parts of Australia’s southeast coast were inundated by the worst flooding in more than a decade. At least 10 people have died.
New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said there had been 1,000 rescues in the state by March 1 and more than 6,000 calls for authorities to help.
Scores of residents, some with pets, spent hours trapped on their roofs by a fast-rising river in the town of Lismore in the state’s North.
Dozens of cars were trapped on a bridge in the nearby town of Woodburn with both the bridge’s approaches submerged. Up to 50 people were rescued from the bridge early March 1, officials said.
›“We had no capabilities to get them off in the dark so we just had to make sure that they bunkered down and we went in this morning and got them all out,” Woodburn State Emergency Services Commander Ashley Slapp said.
The floodwaters were moving South into New South Wales from Queensland state in the worst disaster in the region since what was described as a once-in-a-century event in 2011.
Mr. Perrottet said 40,000 people had been ordered to evacuate, while 300,000 others had been placed under evacuation warnings.
Government meteorologist Jonathan Howe described the recent rainfall in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland as “astronomical.”
Nine of the 10 deaths reported so far were in Queensland. The cleanup was underway in Brisbane, Australia’s third most populous city, despite more storms forecast. Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner urged people to register for the “Mud Army,” as the thousands of volunteers who mobilized to help out after the 2011 floods were dubbed.
Thousands of homes in Brisbane were inundated Feb. 28, many by swollen creeks in suburbs such as Ashgrove, where Kelvin Barfoot had to evacuate with members of his family, including his 99-year-old mother-in-law, Mina Baker, in a State Emergency Service rescue boat.
The family moved back into the top floor of their two-story home and started removing damaged furniture and electrical appliances that had been covered by almost five feet of water.
Mayor Schrinner said the six-day rainfall in downtown Brisbane—31.2 inches through Feb. 28 morning—was significantly higher than the previous record of 25.8 inches set when flooding devastated the city in 1974.
The extraordinary rainfall comes as the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported this week that vast swathes of Australia have already lost 20 percent of its rainfall and the country’s fire risk has gone beyond worst-case scenarios developed just a few years ago.
Australia’s hottest and driest year on record was 2019, which ended with devastating wildfires across southeast Australia. The fires directly killed 33 people and another 400 people were killed by the smoke.
The fires also destroyed more than 3,000 homes and razed 47 million acres of farmland and forests.
But two La Nina weather patterns have since brought above-average rainfall to the same regions.
Lesley Hughes, an Australian academic and lead author of the UN IPCC assessment reports in 2007 and 2015, said climate change was expected to overwhelm government systems such as flood responses.
“We can see that our emergency services are struggling already to cope with the floods in northern New South Wales with people stranded on roofs without food for more than 24 hours,” Hughes said. (AP)
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