Two dead, thousands evacuated over eastern Australia floods
Sydney, Australia, Mar 29 (EFE).- At least two people died due to floods in eastern Australia, while authorities issued Tuesday an evacuation order for 14,500 people from various locations.
The strong rainstorm and wind comes just weeks after serious flooding that inundated towns such as Lismore for days, some 600 kilometers north of Sydney, where clean-up work was still being carried out after the previous disaster.
The current preventive evacuation orders are focused precisely on the inhabitants of Lismore, as well as the city of Ballina and other towns in the Northern Rivers region, authorities said Tuesday.
“Many buildings in Lismore, especially those flooded a month ago, will flood again” as a result of these storms that will last for several days, Steph Cook, Flood Recovery Minister for New South Wales, told the media.
The Meteorology Bureau warned that heavy rains falling on the north coast of New South Wales could trigger “flash flooding that is possibly life-threatening.”
The current storm affects the northern part of New South Wales and the southern part of Queensland, practically the same region hit between the end of February and the beginning of March by the floods that then claimed 22 lives.
“We are all emotionally and physically exhausted, especially those directly affected by the latest flooding, but we can weather it together as a community,” Ballina Councilmember Kiri Dicker said on social media.
Queensland emergency services reported two deaths, one Monday and another Tuesday.
These new floods come after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a report published earlier this month that Australia would face “major impacts” and “irreversible changes” to its natural systems due to the climate crisis.
Experts have said for years that Australia would increasingly suffer from extreme heat and forest fires as a result of the crisis, as well as rising water levels, risks of flooding and ocean acidification. EFE
wat/lds
