Death toll mounts as Sydney warned of ‘tough 48 hours’
The death toll from week-long floods battering Australia’s east coast rose to 20 yesterday, after the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered in floodwaters in Sydney.
Police said it was “suspected” the pair were a missing mother and son whose car was abandoned in a stormwater canal.
Tens of thousands of Sydney residents have been told to evacuate their homes as severe storms and flash flooding inundate swathes of Australia’s largest city.
The national weather bureau warned of “a tough 48 hours ahead” for Sydney, with 60,000 people subject to evacuation orders and warnings across the affected areas, according to emergency services.
Intense rainfall across Sydney flooded bridges and homes, swept away cars and even collapsed the roof of a supermarket.
The Manly Dam, in the city’s north, began to spill yesterday, with 2,000 residents told to leave.
In the suburb of Georges Hall, vehicles were semi-submerged and police had to rescue stranded in their cars by rising floodwaters.
Emergency services have been stretched thin as the torrential rain and storms continued into a second week – with flood warnings in place for the entire 2,000km coastline of New South Wales.
“It’s very much the watery equivalent of the ‘Black Summer’ bush fires,” emergency services spokesman Phil Campbell said.
In the past week the scale of the damage to property and wildlife was similar to those devastating bush fires, which ravaged Australia’s east in late 2019 and early 2020, Campbell said.
In the past 24 hours, emergency services were called to 100 flood rescues across the state, a number that is expected to rise as the full force of the storms bears down on Sydney.
In the northern reaches of New South Wales – where floodwaters this week destroyed homes, washed away cars and stranded hundreds of locals on their roofs – a long, slow clean-up was under way.
There were 800 people in emergency accommodation in the state’s Northern Rivers region alone, state emergency services commissioner Charlene York said.