A Dungog local frees a horse trapped by barbed wire. Authorities have told people to stay out of the floodwaters. Photo / Getty Images
A Dungog local frees a horse trapped by barbed wire. Authorities have told people to stay out of the floodwaters. Photo / Getty Images
High winds, torrential rain and flooding cause havoc across state
Police divers were yesterday searching for two elderly women whose car was swept away by floodwaters in the Hunter region of New South Wales, as a storm of rare ferocity battered Sydney and surrounding areas for a third day.
As the state Premier, Mike Baird, declared the destructive storm a natural disaster, little hope was held of finding the women alive. Their car was engulfed by raging waters about 9am, and four people who tried to pull them out had to be rescued themselves.
Three people have already been killed by the cyclonic winds and torrential rain that have destroyed homes, uprooted trees and power lines, cut electricity to more than 200,000 homes and caused chaos on the roads and to public transport.
Bondi beach is battered by wild weather. Photo / Getty
Although the wild weather eased yesterday afternoon, authorities warned that the coming days could see more flash floods. Sydney has had its wettest two days since 1998, and 300mm of rain in 24 hours was dumped on the small town of Dungog, north of Newcastle, the most for the past century.
Baird warned that conditions were "still very dangerous", and he urged storm-hit communities to "hang tough".
The Hunter region has been hardest hit by what the NSW Emergency Services Minister, David Elliott, called a "once-in-a-decade storm".
The three deaths occurred in Dungog, where two men, Colin Webb, 79, and Brian Wilson, 72, were trapped in their homes by rising floodwaters. Meanwhile, 68-year-old Robin McDonald was reportedly killed while trying to save her dog.
The Central Coast, the Illawarra region south of Sydney and Sydney itself have all been badly affected. By late yesterday, the State Emergency Service (SES) had responded to more than 10,000 calls since the rain and gale-force winds struck on Monday.
An umbrella is seen submerged in the ANZAC War Memorial pond in Hyde Park, Sydney. Photo / Getty
The SES deputy commissioner, Steven Pearce, said: "I haven't seen a storm of this magnitude in my time here at the SES, and, indeed, this would be the largest storm operation in the last 10 years."
In Dungog and the nearby small town of Greta, houses were swept off their piles. One Greta resident, Henry Krayevski, clung to a tree in chest-high water, waiting to be rescued. Earlier, he had watched his home float away after the bucketing rain turned small creeks into churning torrents.
Krayevski was philosophical yesterday, telling the ABC: "The house is a material thing. The biggest thing is that the lady next door, they've also saved her and two little boys. So that was a blessing."
As of yesterday, SES workers - their numbers boosted by reinforcements from interstate - had performed more than 100 flood rescues.
Baird urged locals to stay out of floodwaters, saying the figure "shows people are not only putting their own lives at risk, but the lives of our emergency workers at risk".
The storm, packing gusts of up to 130km/h, was technically an east coast low - a low-pressure system that developed off Australia's southeast coast.
More than 160 schools closed yesterday, and businesses were badly disrupted, as many train lines in Sydney and other affected areas were closed or experienced severe delays.
Bus services were also hit, and some major roads were closed because of flooding.
Some international flights into Sydney Airport were diverted to Melbourne or Brisbane, and the world's largest coal port, at Newcastle, was closed.
The storm - believed to have caused many millions of dollars of damage - also rearranged Australia's best known beach. Bondi Beach, in Sydney, was barely recognisable, with sand whipped up by the winds creating new dunes and carpeting the promenade and car park.
An intense low pressure system that forms in the Tasman Sea. They drive high winds, heavy rain and dangerous surf into coastal areas of NSW, southern Queensland and far eastern Victoria and tend to be most frequent in autumn and winter, and particularly in June.
Why do east coast lows cause bad weather? They draw strong, moisture-laden winds across the coast, which cause heavy rain to fall when they are uplifted by the hills and ranges that run parallel to the coast.
Are they dangerous? Yes. They can cause gales or storm force winds that can damage buildings, fell trees and powerlines, cause powerful surf that can damage the coast and, in some cases, run ships aground. They can also dump hundreds of millimetres of rain, causing flash flooding and riverine flooding.
