SYDNEY | Tens of thousands of Syndey residents have been told to evacuate their homes following heavy rainfall and sudden flooding that hit the country’s largest city on Tuesday.
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The Australian Meteorological Agency has called for vigilance for the next 48 hours which promise to be “difficult”. Some 60,000 people have been ordered or asked to evacuate, according to the emergency services.
The human toll of these “unprecedented” floods which affected a large part of the coast amounted to 18 dead on Tuesday.
Police are still searching for a mother and son whose car was found abandoned in the middle of storm water in western Sydney.
These floods are the “aquatic equivalent of the unprecedented wildfires” that ravaged Australia for months in 2019 and 2020, Phil Campbell, spokesman for the relief services, told AFP.
The severe weather, which began last week, caused property and wildlife damage similar to those fires, he added.
“They have the same consequences for the population: closed roads, damaged infrastructure and power cuts,” he said.
In northern New South Wales, flooding has destroyed homes, swept away cars and forced hundreds of residents to their roofs.
Mullumbimby, a town south of Brisbane has been cut off from the rest of the world for several days, without a telephone, without internment and without outside help, resident Casey Whelan told AFP.
“Many people on my street cannot be compensated by insurance (…) they will have no way to rebuild,” he lamented.
Australia has been hit hard in recent years by climate change: droughts, deadly bushfires and floods are becoming more frequent and intense.