Australia evacuates flooded towns after deadly Cyclone Debbie.
A second woman's body was found Friday and tens of thousands
of people were evacuated from towns in two Australian states after torrential
rain caused by a powerful tropical cyclone.
Category four Cyclone Debbie hit northeastern Australia on
Tuesday between Bowen and Airlie Beach in Queensland state, ripping up trees,
washing boats onto land and causing widespread damage.
Debbie was downgraded to a tropical low as it tracked
southeast, but continued to pack damaging gusts and dump huge amounts of rain
all the way down the east coast to New South Wales state, south of Queensland,
and Sydney.
NSW Police said the body of a woman who "disappeared in
floodwaters overnight from a rural property" near Murwillumbah just south
of the Queensland border was found on Friday.
Map tracking the route of tropical cyclone Debbie in
northeast Australia
Earlier Friday, SES acting deputy commissioner Mark Morrow
said he had fears for some missing residents from Lismore.
"As we start to go out and try to find people that
made... calls overnight, there could be some very distressing news," he
told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"There could be people overnight that perished in that
flood, we don't know at this stage."
Other towns subject to evacuation orders include Tweed
Heads, Kingscliff and Murwillumbah.
"I think a lot of people are going to have a lot of
significant damage on the farms," he told the ABC.
"It is the worst I have ever seen I have to
admit."
- Clean-up efforts -
A State Emergency Service crew close off a flooded road in
Beenleigh, noertheast Australia on March 31, 2017
Further north in Queensland, the popular tourist city of
Gold Coast and other nearby regions were also inundated by water. Upper
Springbrook in the Gold Coast hinterland recorded 789 millimetres (31 inches)
of water on Thursday, the Bureau of Meteorology said.
"In terms of what happened in the last 24 or 48 hours,
we have seen some pretty big rainfall totals," he told Brisbane's Courier
Mail.
"There is still that strong risk around the Gold
Coast."
Focus has turned to the restoration of essential services
such as water and electricity in the areas hit by Debbie, including Bowen,
Mackay and the Whitsunday islands where some 50,000 people were still without
power, officials said.
A group of workers paddle through floodwaters in a small
boat to check on a house in Beenleigh, northeast Australia on March 31, 2017
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said some 2,000
properties had been assessed, with about 270 severely damaged.
"The army is doing everything it can to get water into
those parts of North Queensland that I mentioned -- Airlie, Proserpine, Bowen
and the Whitsunday islands," she told reporters.
"We also have structural engineers that are on the
ground at the moment."
The Insurance Council of Australia declared the Queensland
and northern NSW regions disaster zones, adding that the damage bill could
reach Aus$1 billion (US $770 million).
"The overall event will certainly be in the hundreds of
millions of dollars," the council's chief Rob Whelan told reporters
Friday.
He compared it to Cyclone Oswald, a category five storm
which hit in 2013 and caused over Aus$1 billion in damage.
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