Disasters & Accidents

Australia deploys 150 soldiers for evacuations in the flood-hit northeast

Sydney, Australia, Dec 18 (EFE).- The Australian government on Monday ordered the deployment of up to 150 soldiers to assist with emergency and evacuation tasks in several northeastern towns that have been cut-off due to floods after Cyclone Jasper hit last week.

The government will send “emergency helicopter support & personnel to evacuate isolated residents,” Australian Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt said on X (formerly Twitter).

Torrential rainfall has been falling for the past five days in the towns between the Aboriginal community of Wujal Wujal and Port Douglas, located north of the city of Cairns, which is one of the main access points to the Great Barrier Reef.

Images published on Monday by several Australian media showed rivers of muddy water and uprooted trees in the streets, people trapped on their roofs, submerged cars and planes, bridges destroyed by floods and residents being rescued in boats.

So far at least 300 people have been rescued in what was an “extraordinarily challenging, challenging evening,” the police commissioner of the northeastern state of Queensland, Katarina Carroll, told reporters in Brisbane.

Queensland authorities hope to relocate about 270 residents of the remote community of Wujal Wujal to the town of Cooktown, where – as in Ingham – crocodiles have been sighted near residential areas on a day during which heavy rains are expected to continue.

In the tourist city of Cairns, where the storm is expected to subside in the afternoon, flights have been canceled or delayed as a result of the cleaning and debris removal work on the runway after Cyclone Jasper’s passage.

Jasper, which made landfall on Wednesday as a category 2 cyclone near Wujal Wujal, lost strength as soon as it touched land to become a tropical storm.

Although powerful cyclones are not common in Australia, they occasionally hit the northern part of the Oceania country, such as the category 5 Cyclone Yasi, which devastated Queensland in February 2011, leaving one person dead and causing considerable damage. EFE

wat/pd

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