Residents of a previously drought-stricken area of southeastern Australian were being evacuated to safety yesterday as rising flood-waters threatened to swamp homes and farmland.
Scores of people have already been evacuated by army helicop-ters and police from homes in Gippsland in the east of Victoria state as officials warned that the deluge could worsen as rivers peak.
Jeff Amos, deputy mayor of the Wellington Shire Council, said it was ironic that residents who had recently battled savage bushfires and a long-standing drought had been confronted almost overnight with a flood emergency.
"It was a fair deluge during the past week which has put an end to the drought in one way," Amos said. "But unfortunately it's probably going to do more damage than good. We've gone from drought to being completely under water."
Many roads remain closed, scores of schools shut and hun-dreds of homes without power while the farming town of Newry has disappeared under water.
"Everything gets swept away and everything's chaotic," Prime Minister John Howard told commercial radio as he pledged extra cash relief for those affected.
Workers from the State Emergency Service said most swollen rivers had peaked and begun to recede but that waters draining into the Gippsland lakes region would be met by a king tide later yesterday.
"In effect, the high tide is going to hold these waters in. They will have no chance to be released into the ocean and this could seriously affect a number of properties over a substantial area," spokesman Allan Briggs said.
Victorian Premier Steve Bracks said 700 volunteers were on alert.
"We do expect that it could get worse and there is a chance of it getting worse in the next 24 hours as that body of water comes forward," he said.
Bushfires raged through eastern Victoria for three months earlier this year, burning almost 1.2 million hectares of land, with Gippsland one of the areas worst-hit.
"While the rain is welcome following the devastating bushfires that ravaged many parts of Victoria last summer, I know that the floods have brought problems of their own," Australian Governor-General Michael Jeffery admitted.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to