Thousands of homeowners remained isolated in Australia’s flood-hit northeast yesterday, where authorities said days of torrential rain had created a vast “inland sea.”
Swollen rivers peaked overnight, allowing clean-up operations to begin and evacuated residents to return to the northern New South Wales (NSW) towns of Grafton and Kempsey, the State Emergency Service (SES) said.
But SES spokesman Greg Slater said up to 20,000 people in small communities remained cut off by the floodwaters, which have led to disaster declarations in NSW and Queensland.
“We’re concentrating our efforts on those communities in terms of resupply and provision of immediate medical assistance and medical supplies, also just the basic necessities, foodstuff and the like,” he told Sky News.
Two people have died in the floods, which dumped one-third of southeast Queensland’s average annual rainfall in just 24 hours.
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees flew over the affected area yesterday and said it was difficult to grasp the extent of the floods, even from the air.
“It’s an inland sea, and you see the [animal] stocks that are isolated and the towns that are isolated and you wonder where it’s all going to go,” he told reporters.
Rees appointed former police commissioner Ken Maroney to coordinate clean-up in the northern NSW region, which has been hit by three major floods since February.
“This will be a large-scale recovery effort to help restore the region,” Rees said.
He estimated the damage bill would be in the tens of millions of dollars because of structural damages to roads and bridges.
Clarence Valley Mayor Richie Williamson said flood mitigation measures in most major towns withstood the rising waters overnight.
“Things are starting to get back to normal thankfully,” he said.
“Last night it was touch and go as the peak arrived at Maclean. Thankfully the levee wasn’t overtopped there. Things are also okay in Yamba as well, albeit very, very wet,” he said.
Floods unleashed by cyclonic rains in February saw much of Queensland declared a disaster area, with more than 1 million square kilometers deluged and 3,000 homes damaged.
More floods hammered the area last month, washing a number of motorists to their death and claiming the life of a 12-year-old girl who was swimming in a swollen weir.
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
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate