Rescue workers urged thousands of people to evacuate their homes yesterday after deadly storms lashed Australia's east coast, leaving parts of one city looking like an earthquake had struck, officials said.
The death toll rose to nine when police found the body of a man who died after he was swept into a stormwater drain on a flooded road.
Authorities earlier found the body of a man who died when his car was swept off a highway into a swollen creek.
PHOTO: AFP
His wife and three young children, aged two, three and nine and who were traveling with him, also died when the road collapsed underneath them, but their bodies had been found earlier.
Although bringing much-needed rain to Sydney and towns to its north, the storms have wreaked havoc since slamming into the city and the Central Coast and Newcastle to the north on Friday.
Among the dead are a 29-year-old man crushed when a tree fell on his car near Newcastle and a couple who perished when their vehicle was swept off a bridge while crossing a flooded river in the Hunter Valley.
Officials said Newcastle looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake.
"What I saw were parts of Newcastle that resembled the kind of damage that followed the [1989] earthquake," New South Wales state premier Morris Iemma said after visiting the city.
"Construction sites and scaffolding, debris on roads, abandoned cars, homes that were damaged, trees having fallen on homes, extensive damage," he said.
The 1989 earthquake had a magnitude of 5.6 and killed 13 people.
Newcastle resident Harry Gregory told the Sunday Telegraph that he fled his home after his bed and fridge started to float in the floodwaters.
"Everything's ruined," he said. "I have a lounge [sofa] stuck in my front fence and I have got no idea who it belongs to."
Emergency workers evacuated 400 people from their homes along the Central Coast overnight, including by boat and helicopter, and yesterday were urging some 5,000 residents in Maitland and Singleton to the north to seek shelter away from rising floodwaters.
State Emergency Services spokesman Steve Delaney said the Hunter River could peak at 11m higher than normal later in the day.
"There is a real, clear possibility that the levy might overtop this evening," he said.
Backed by gale force winds, the storms have driven a huge freighter aground in Newcastle, forced the suspension of ferry services on Sydney Harbour and blacked out tens of thousands of homes.
Prime Minister John Howard said those affected by storms and flooding would be entitled to cash payments in addition to natural disaster funding offered by the state government.
"I know I speak for every Australian in saying that the country is thinking of you and we're heartbroken by the loss of lives and the tragic circumstances in which a number of people have lost their lives," he said. "It is an immense disaster."
Maritime officials said the 30,000-tonne vessel Pasha Bulker, still stranded on a Newcastle beach after running aground amid huge seas on Friday, had some power restored to it and appeared to be intact.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS