3 die, others missing in fierce storms

Turnbull pours raw emotions into election campaign

SYDNEY, June 6, (AFP): Wild weather which smashed into Australia’s east coast and whipped up giant waves on Sydney beaches has left at least three people dead and others missing, police said Monday as the clean-up began.

Ferocious storms pounded the coast over the weekend, causing flooding in New South Wales state. Huge seas eroded the shoreline, in one instance sweeping the in-ground swimming pool of a beachside home onto the beach.

“This storm, which was so ferocious, has taken life from us,” New South Wales Premier Mike Baird said as he warned that conditions remained dangerous.

“It is clear — the ferocity of this storm was such that the damage has been unbelievable up and down the coast.”

The Bureau of Meteorology said a combination of rain, wind and wave action had created the conditions which saw beaches strewn with debris and rivers and creeks bursting their banks.

One part of Sydney suffered its worst flooding in 30 years, while the city’s Observatory Hill weather station received some 226 millimetres (8.9 inches) of rain over the weekend — well above the average monthly rainfall for June of 131.9 millimetres.

The bureau said a wind gust in excess of 115 kms per hour (71 mph) was recorded in Sydney Harbour, while two of the airport’s three runways were closed due to high winds.

Retrieved

Police said divers had retrieved two bodies from cars swept away by floodwaters, one in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Leppington and another near the town of Bowral, some 100 kms south of the city.

“It is a tragedy these two lives have been lost. We simply do not know how either of these two men came to be in the flood waters,” said acting assistant state police commissioner Kyle Stewart.

“But what we know is that their deaths show just how dangerous flood waters are.”

Authorities said the body of a third man was found near a flooded river crossing close to Canberra.

The storm swept south from Queensland, through New South Wales and onto Tasmania where police Monday held grave fears for two people thought to have been swept away by floodwaters.

A man aged in his 80s was believed to have been swept away, Tasmanian police said, while the wife of another elderly man rescued by helicopter through the roof of his inundated home was missing.

A swimmer seen in distress at Sydney’s Bondi Beach was also missing after lifeguards and a rescue helicopter failed to find him.

Abnormally high tides and damaging surf were still pounding parts of the New South Wales coast late Monday, and flood warnings were in place in Tasmania.

In the hard-hit northern Sydney beach suburb of Collaroy, Fran Young was left to contemplate the ocean which had swallowed part of her waterfront garden overnight.

“It was definitely the most ferocious (storm) I’ve ever seen; the sea was pounding,” she told AFP. “It felt like it was coming directly, straight at all of us.”

Australia’s election campaign took a personal turn Monday, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull telling voters how his father raised him alone after his mother walked out.

The multi-millionaire from Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs posted an emotional online video tribute to his late father Bruce, saying: “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dad.”

Turnbull said most of his childhood was spent with his father after his mother left them while he was still in primary school.

“We didn’t have much money, he was a hotel broker and for most of that time he was battling,” he said in the video released Sunday.

Asked whether the posting was designed to counter opposition claims that he was out of touch with ordinary Australians ahead of July 2 polls, the prime minister tugged further on the heart strings.

“When my mother left us, we had nowhere to live,” he told reporters in Melbourne.

Rented

“Dad rented a flat and didn’t have any furniture. I think the only bit of furniture we had left was my bed so he had every reason to be a bit unhappy, to say the least.

“Yet he never, ever said a bad word about her. He never uttered a critical word of my mother in all of those years.”

Turnbull said that after his parents both died — his father was killed at age 56 in a plane crash and his mother died in 1991 — he found letters the pair sent each other over the years.

“The letters, they were filled with sadness and reproach and you know, ‘How could you do this?’ and ‘Why did you do that?’ and the back and forth,” he said.

“I thought, what does it say about a man? What does it say about his love that he could sit down and write letters like that, pouring out his heart and then turn to his little boy and say, ‘Your mother is the greatest woman in the world and she loves you more than anything’. What a man. What a great man.”

The Facebook video, which has been viewed more than 500,000 times, touched a nerve with many.

But one voter, who called herself a “nice grandmother”, questioned what it had to do with policy issues, adding: “Sorry I’m not voting for Mr Turnbull’s father.”

A hunt was underway Monday for a monster six-metre shark blamed for a fatal attack on a diver in western Australia, despite allegations it amounted to a “revenge killing”.

The woman, 60, was fatally mauled one kilometre (half a mile) offshore from Perth on Sunday, by a shark described by witnesses as bigger than their 5.3-metre (17.4-foot) boat.

A surfer also succumbed to his injuries on Friday after his leg was bitten off by a shark along the same coastline last week.

The West Australian fisheries department said it would deploy “capture gear” to haul in what they believe is a great white shark that poses “a serious threat to public safety”.

Fisheries official Tony Cappelluti said if a shark matching the description of the one that attacked the diver was captured, it was “highly likely we will take the decision to destroy it in the interests of public safety”.