Flooding rivers in Australia following four days of heavy rain have submerged homes and roads. Tens of thousands of Sydney residents had to leave their homes on Tuesday.
Authorities in New South Wales have called on some 50,000 people to evacuate and 28,000 to prepare to do the same, authorities said. The emergency services carried out 142 rescues in 24 hours with the help of a hundred soldiers.
Australia is particularly affected by climate change, regularly hit by droughts, devastating forest fires, not to mention repeated and increasingly intense floods.
Rapid rise in water
These heavy rains fell on an already partly soggy ground which led to a rapid rise in water levels, especially in the western suburbs of Sydney. “It was so sudden,” Gordon Lee, a resident of Shanes Park, a suburb west of Sydney, told AFP, some areas of which were flooded overnight from Monday to Tuesday.
“We didn’t even have time to take anything, we just took our dogs and went to higher ground on the street,” he told AFP.
Mr. Lee, who was a farmer, said when he retired regarding 15 years ago the floods were less frequent. ‘I see younger people moving in to try to farm here…but they are losing everything.’
According to the weather services, the weather front will head north along the coast following four days of heavy rainfall.
Permanent vigilance
“Sydney is not out of danger, now is not the time to slack off,” said Carlene York, the state’s emergency services chief. New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet called on people to comply with evacuation orders, saying ‘this event is far from over’.
The federal government has declared a state of natural disaster in 23 flooded areas of New South Wales, releasing aid for affected residents. Windsor Police Station staff were evacuated, police said.
Many residents affected by this meteorological event had already been victims of the successive floods on the East Coast which, in 2021 and March, killed more than twenty people. This is the case of Alan Dalrymple, 62, a resident of Windsor in the western suburbs of Sydney whose house has been flooded four times in 18 months. He admits to being “a little nervous”.
‘There is not much you can do regarding it (…). You just smile and carry on. No need to complain because no one wants to hear people complain, that’s for sure,’ he told AFP.
Hard time
Most of the affected areas are downstream of the Warragamba Dam, west of Sydney, which overflowed. It provides most of the city’s drinking water. “People on the East Coast are going through a very difficult time right now,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.
“My thoughts are with the people who have suffered once more and once more and once more, many of these communities have also been affected by the wildfires,” he told reporters. He called on people to ‘stay safe and vigilant’.
Rainfall has eased in parts of Sydney but flood warnings are likely to persist for several days, warned Jane Golding of the state meteorology office.
/ATS
