Australia’s south east was lashed by another round of intense rainfall on Monday with thousands of people ordered to evacuate and more than 200 schools closed.
Australian authorities are planning to evacuate from flood-affected suburbs in Sydney’s west, which is set for its worst flooding in 60 years with drenching rain expected to continue for the next few days.
It comes just a year after unprecedented climate-change bushfires burned across the same region, which followed a prolonged drought that had also seen Sydney introduce water restrictions.
“We need to brace ourselves, it will be a very difficult week,” said NSW state Premier Gladys Berejiklian.
“I don’t know any time in a state history where we have had these extreme weather conditions in such quick succession in the middle of a pandemic,” Berejiklian said.
Sydney on Sunday recorded the wettest day of the year with almost 111 mm (4.4 inches) of rain, while some regions in NSW’s north coast received nearly 900 mm of rain in the last six days, more than three times the March average, government data showed. Authorities said around 18,000 people have been evacuated from low-lying areas of the state.
Large parts of the country’s east coast will get hit by more heavy rains from Monday due to the combination of a tropical low over northern Western Australia and a coastal trough off NSW, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) official Jane Golding said.
Some places in Sydney’s western regions have seen the worst flooding since 1961, authorities said, as they expect the wild weather to continue until Wednesday. A severe flood warning has been issued for large parts of NSW as well as neighbouring Queensland.
Australia was due to begin the first major public phase of vaccine distribution on Monday, although the programme has slipped behind the government’s announced timetable because of supply and delivery issues.
