A big swell pounds the break wall at Wollongong harbour in NSW. Photo: Robert Peep
rachel lebihan, Matthew Cranston and AAP
Car flooded at Clayfield.
Yacht/catamaran washed up at middle park beach.
Eagle St at high tide, around 10pm Sunday evening.
Brighton, north of Brisbane.
Firefighters near a fallen tree in the suburb of Gordon Park in Brisbane after the rescue of a woman and her child.
Flooding along the Ipswich motorway.
A boat that has been washed up onto rocks at Airlie Beach.
People recover chickens from Northey street city farm Brisbane.
Volunteers help remove belonging from a resident’s home in Enid Street, Ipswich.
Mandatory evacuations have been ordered in Bundaberg’s north, with authorities saying people could die if they stay.
The Burnett River continues to head towards an unprecedented peak. The river is 9.1m and rapidly rising.
It’s expected to reach at least 9.5 metres on Monday, and possibly as high as 10 metres, which is well beyond the levels recorded in 2010-11 and in 1942, when the current record was set.
There have been dramatic helicopter rescues of people in the north Bundaberg area during the day.
Councillor Tony Riccardi said all residents in that area, including Belmont Park and One Mile Road, are now subject to a mandatory evacuation order.
Previously authorities had only been advising residents to leave.
Mr Riccardi said about 70 per cent of north Bundaberg residents have water in their yard or over the floor boards.
Widespread flooding in Queensland has now claimed three lives. The body of a man, believed to be a motorcyclist who was swept off the road, has been has been found in floodwaters south of Brisbane.
He’s the third person killed in the floods. Police say the body was found in Oxley Creek about 7am (AEST).
Police say the two other people who have died in the floods are an 81-year-old man whose body was pulled from the water near Bundaberg and a 27-year-old man who was found near Gympie.
A tree has also fallen on a mother and son in Brisbane’s north. The 30-year-old woman and boy have been taken to hospital with head injuries. Their conditions are not known.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the wild weather in Queensland caused by cyclone Oswald has broken a lot of hearts.
She also discussed the flood crisis in Queensland and said she has spoken to Queensland Premier Campbell Newman on Sunday to offer federal government support as needed.
She said this is a particularly heart breaking time for people who are facing their second and third flood in a two year period.
The cyclone has caused millions of dollars worth of damage and cut power to 225,000 properties. Energex latest report notes that 1200 powerlines are down across the state.
In Brisbane 68 roads are closed due to flooding, fallen powerlines or trees. Brisbane City Council has handed out over 18,000 sandbags since Friday morning
storm lashes nsw
.
In NSW about 2000 people have been cut off by floodwaters and emergency services have performed more than 10 rescues, as destructive winds and rain hit the northern part of the state and move slowly south.
Severe weather warnings have been issued for much of NSW as the storm moves slowly across the Queensland border, ushering in winds of up to 140km/h.
People in Sydney, the Illawarra, the Northern Rivers, the mid-north coast, the Hunter and the northern and central tablelands are all being warned to prepare for heavy rain that may lead to flash flooding, with the Hopkins Creek weather station near Mullumbimby on the far north coast recording almost 540mm of rain in the last 24 hours to 9am(AEDT).
The SES said its volunteers were door-knocking around South Murwillumbah on Monday at around 11am (AEDT) to warn residents that the levy may be breached in the next few hours.
People wishing to evacuate have been told to make their way to the Catholic Hall, the SES tweeted.
It comes after the Bureau of Meteorology issued a minor to moderate flood warning for the Tweed River at Murwillumbah, with reports it hit 4.2 metres on Monday morning.
The bureau expects the Bellinger river at Bellingen to reach 6.5 metres around 4pm on Monday.
Bellingen Shire Council Mayor Mark Troy told AAP the town had already been cut in half after a main bridge, Lavenders Bridge, went under water.
“The town is divided but people are well accustomed to that,” he said, adding residents in some upper Bellinger Valley areas could be cut off for up to two days.
Waterfall Way, the main road out of town, was still open but Mr Troy urged drivers to exercise extreme caution.
“No matter how often the message goes out we do hear of people trying to drive across the flooded roads,” he said.
“It is just not worth the risk.”
As it moves south, Newcastle will probably start seeing the worst of it on late Monday evening with winds forecast to reach up to 100km/h and downpours of up to 200mm.
Damage bill
Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan confirmed that 35 local authorities had been declared eligible for disaster relief payments.
Mr Swan said it was too early to tell whether the damage bill would top the $6 billion mark from the devastating floods of 2011. A new Queensland Flood Appeal has been launched with the state government donating $1 million already.
The group declared large parts of Queensland to be ‘catastrophic’, with moderate to severe damage experienced from the NSW border to Cairns.
Telstra services are also down across much of central and northern Queensland causing havoc for emergency services, which have been called out for eight emergency rescues.
The collapse in telecommunications services came as authorities warned residents in low-lying areas in the Lockyer Valley in southeast Queensland to evacuate and seek higher ground before major flooding hits.
The peak level in the Brisbane River is set to reach 2.6 metres, well under the 4-metre level reached during the devastating 2011 floods.
Major flooding was expected overnight downstream of Laidley and Gatton in Lockyer Creek and Laidley Creek and anyone at risk of flooding should seek higher ground, the warning said.
Residents around the Mary River at Gympie were also warned of flooding, with those in low-lying areas urged to relocate to higher ground if necessary before an expected flood peak of 21 metres hits.
As dawn broke, rescuers in the flood-hit city of Bundaberg were battling to reach 30 people trapped on rooftops.
Premier Campbell Newman said it’s been too dangerous to save those people, but efforts were continuing.
Bundaberg flood crest 8.7m
He said the flood in Bundaberg was expected to break all records, with water levels reaching 8.7 metres at 5am on Monday.
Mr Newman said the city was expecting a flood “well and truly beyond the formal record flood of 1942” and possibly bigger than a flood that wasn’t properly recorded in the 1890s.
“There is quite a critical situation there at the moment with 30 people stranded on roofs,” he told ABC News 24.
Telstra said that most of the landline and broadband services were down in Mackay, Freshwater, Cairns, Rockhampton, Townsville, Mount Isa and Gladstone.
Many mobile services are out in central and northern parts of the state. The emergency triple zero service has also been impacted by the damage and new emergency numbers for key population cities were set up (see below).
The carrier has flown crews into central and northern Queensland to repair damage, but services are not expected to be restored until Monday afternoon at the earliest.
Police say where possible, people impacted by the Telstra outage should use mobile phone coverage of an alternative carrier to call triple zero.
Telstra's coastal fibre-optic cable, which carries much of the state's communications needs, was damaged by severe flooding in the Colosseum area on Friday evening.
160,000 without power
This was followed by further damage to a back-up cable north of Harlin late Sunday as well as power outages.
Meanwhile, Energex spokesman Nathan Hatch told the ABC that in the early hours on Monday 160,000 properties were still without power, down from 230,000 on Sunday night.
But he said it could take up to 48 hours before power was returned to some homes.
"As soon as it gets light our crews will really get out there and restore as much power as they possibly can, safely of course," he said.
"The weather has been so extreme. There's been flooded rivers, trees across roads, it could be quite a while ... We'll know a lot more once it's light."
Emergency numbers for northern and central Queensland:
Cairns 4030 7000
Mareeba 4030 3340
Townsville 4750 5581 or 4750 5583
Mt Isa 4744 1111 or 4744 1808
Mackay 4968 3530
Gladstone 4971 3222
READ NEXT:
No comments:
Post a Comment