Six Australians have died since Friday and about 60 were evacuated from apartment buildings threatened by flooding in Sydney on Saturday night, as rainstorms continued a two-week battering of the nation’s east coast.
Downpours eroded soil at a construction site in western Sydney’s Harris Park, where residents of three adjacent buildings at risk of collapse were evacuated as a precaution, New South Wales state police said in a statement on its Web site.
On South Ballina Beach in the state’s north, a six-year-old boy died after being swept away while walking along the waterline with his father and elder brother, police said, adding to five deaths in neighboring Queensland on Friday.
Photo: EPA/QUEENSLAND FIRE AND EMERGENCY SERVICES
Two weeks of storms along the coast have temporarily halted the rail network serving Newcastle, the world’s biggest harbor for coal exports, and are expected to cost the insurance arm of Suncorp Group Ltd about A$135 million (US$106 million).
“The amount of rain that came down here was unheard of,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters in Brisbane yesterday. “We want to make sure that people can pick up their lives and they can rebuild.”
In Caboolture, Queensland, an outlying suburb north of Brisbane where four of the six deaths occurred, as much as 36cm of rain fell in 24 hours. Numerous locations in a portion of the country from Noosa, north of Brisbane, to Coffs Harbour in northern New South Wales state received more than 10cm of rain in the same period, according to maps published on Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology Web site.
On Saturday, the bureau said that flooding could develop over the weekend in river catchments around the Port Hedland Coast and the De Grey River. It issued an alert for the Pilbara area in Western Australia and said that flooding could develop into yesterday.
A flood warning for the Onslow Coast and Lyndon-Minilya river catchments in the western Pilbara was canceled yesterday and the bureau said floodwaters would ease over the next few days.
The Pilbara is the world’s biggest producer of iron ore, and Port Hedland is the largest export harbor for the steelmaking commodity. Port Hedland and Dampier, the country’s No. 2 ore-export harbor, remained open, while Ashburton was closed, the Pilbara Ports Authority said on its Web site.
In Caboolture, a man in his 70s, a woman in her 30s and an eight-year-old boy were pronounced dead at the spot where their car was reported to have been swept away at about 5:30pm on Friday.
At about 6am on Saturday morning, police recovered the body of a 49-year-old man who was in a separate car in the same incident.
At about 3am on Saturday, police recovered the body of a 75-year-old man whose car was swept away by floodwaters in the suburb of Burpengary, they said in another statement.
“This is the tragic outcome of where vehicles have entered flooded roads,” Queensland Police Service Inspector Lee Jeffries told reporters on Saturday in Caboolture. “I would like to never see these types of incidents occur again.”
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