Tens of thousands of people had been ordered to evacuate their homes by yesterday and many more had been told to prepare to flee as parts of Australia’s southeast coast were inundated by the worst flooding in decades that has claimed at least nine lives.
Scores of residents, some with pets, spent hours trapped on their roofs in the past few days by a fast-rising river in the town of Lismore in northern New South Wales state.
The body of a woman in her 80s was yesterday found by a neighbor in her Lismore home, a police statement said. There were no details of how she died.
Photo: AP / Queensland Fire and Emergency Services
MANHOLE TRAP
There were concerns that householders who climbed into their roof spaces through ceiling manholes could become trapped by rising waters.
A police rescue officer had saved an elderly woman from such a roof space that was almost filled with water, Lismore State Emergency Service Commander Steve Patterson said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“He dived in through a window, noticed the manhole cover was open, when he checked, found a 93-year-old lady with about 20cm left of space before the water hit the top,” Patterson told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Dozens of vehicles were trapped on a bridge in the nearby town of Woodburn over Monday night with both the bridge’s approaches submerged.
Up to 50 people were rescued from the bridge early yesterday, 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 flood waters 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.
New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said there had been 1,000 rescues in his state by yesterday and more than 6,000 calls for authorities to help.
Perrottet said 40,000 people had been ordered to evacuate, while 300,000 others had been placed under evacuation warnings.
“We’ll be doing everything ... We can to get everybody to safety and get these communities right across our state back on their feet as quickly as possible,” Perrottet said.
Government meteorologist Jonathan Howe described the amount of recent rainfall in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland as “astronomical.”
Eight of the nine deaths of the current disaster were in Queensland.
Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said emergency services held grave concerns for a man aged in his 70s who fell from his moored yacht in the state capital, Brisbane ,into a swollen river on Saturday and for a 76-year-old man who disappeared with his vehicle in flood water northwest of Brisbane on Sunday.
FIRE RISK
The extraordinary rainfall comes as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 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 19 million hectares of farmland and forests.
However, two La Nina weather patterns have since brought above-average rainfall to the same regions.
Lesley Hughes, an Australian academic and former lead author of the 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.
School bullies in Singapore are to face caning under new guidelines, but the education minister on Tuesday said it would be meted out only as a last resort with strict safeguards. Human rights groups regularly criticize Singapore for the use of corporal punishment, which remains part of the school and criminal justice systems, but authorities have defended it as a deterrent to crime and serious misconduct. Caning was discussed in the parliament after legislators asked how it would be used in relation to bullying in schools. The debate followed stricter guidelines on serious student misconduct, including bullying, unveiled by the Singaporean Ministry of
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
A MESSAGE: Japan’s participation in the Balikatan drills is a clear deterrence signal to China not to attack Taiwan while the US is busy in the Middle East, an analyst said The Japan Self-Defense Forces yesterday fired a Type 88 anti-ship missile during a joint maritime exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces, hitting a decommissioned Philippine Navy ship in waters facing the disputed South China Sea, in drills that underscore Tokyo’s rising willingness to project military power on China’s doorstep. The drill took place as Manila and Tokyo began talks on a potential defense equipment transfer, made possible by Japan’s decision to scrap restrictions on military exports. The discussions include the possible early transfer of Abukuma-class destroyers and TC-90 aircraft to the Philippines, Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi said. Philippine Secretary of
A South Korean judge who last week more than doubled former South Korean first lady Kim Keon-hee’s prison sentence was found dead yesterday, police said. Shin Jong-o was found unconscious at about 1am at the Seoul High Court building, an investigator at the Seocho District Police Station in Seoul said. Shin was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, he said. “There is no sign of foul play in the death,” the investigator added. Local media reported that Shin had left a suicide note, but the investigator said there was none. On Tuesday last week, Shin presided over 53-year-old Kim’s appeal trial, finding her guilty
RSS