Australia mops up after deluge
Last year it was fires, this year it’s floods. Australia is reeling after yet another climate disaster
AUSTRALIANS can be forgiven for thinking someone has it in for them. Early last year the country was plunged into the bowels of hell when catastrophic fires destroyed 26 million hectares of land.
Now a flood of biblical proportions has drowned vast swathes of the countryside – and the disaster has elements of horror rarely seen outside a country where the animal world is often unique and frequently bizarre.
As day after day of rain lashed the state of New South Wales (NSW), creatures creepy and crawly went into mass migration mode to escape the floodwaters.
Residents told of millions of spiders on the march, carpeting the ground in a moving sea of brown.
Matt Lovenfosse, who lives on the midnorth coast of NSW, arrived home to be greeted by a seething mass of arachnids. “I didn’t know what it was at first so I had a closer look and it was millions of spiders,” he told news website Guardian Australia.
Shenae and Steve Varley of western Sydney also reported seeing skinks – members of the lizard family – and ants fleeing for dear life.
“Basically every insect, all just trying to get away from the waters,” Shenae says. “My husband videoed it because I wasn’t going close. When he was standing still, he had spiders climbing up his legs.”
THREE weather systems converged to deliver once-in-acentury flooding that battered the coast, affecting about a third of Australia’s 25 million residents. Days of downpours led to around 40 000 inhabitants being evacuated. Homes were submerged, livestock swept away and crops destroyed. Watercraft were used to rescue animals – from dogs to cows and even an emu.
In a rare event, water cascaded down the monolith Uluru in the arid north. The town of Kendall near Port Macquarie received a staggering 700mm of rain.
Bridges were submerged, an entire house floated down a river and cars were tossed about like boats.
Unlike the deadly toll of last year’s bushfires in which 34 people lost their lives and up to three billion animals were killed or displaced, there has been just one human fatality. The body of truck driver Ayaz Younus (25) was found in a car trapped by floodwaters, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reports. His body was found under 6m of water,
When the sun came out, floodwaters receded, leaving a muddy mess in their wake. Rescue operations began, with helicopters used to deliver food and supplies. Army personnel were deployed to affected areas to help in recovery efforts.
Authorities are preparing to do some serious soul-searching to work out how to move forward amid such extreme weather events.
“It’s not too late to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld,” says Michael E Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University in the US.
But he called for urgency in the lowering of carbon emissions to prevent a catastrophic 1,5°C warming of the planet.
“Adapting to the harsh new reality Australia now faces will be hard, but it’ll be possible with sufficient government funding and infrastructure to support climate resilience,” he says.
“If, however, we allow the planet to continue to heat up, many heavily occupied parts of Australia will simply become uninhabitable.”