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Thousands of Australians were ordered to leave their homes in Sydney on Sunday as torrential rain and floodwaters inundated the city’s outskirts. Roads were closed throughout the city, and authorities said at least 18 mandatory evacuations were in effect in western Sydney, which was inundated with severe flooding in March.
“This is a life-threatening extraordinary circumstance,” New South Wales emergency services minister Stephanie Cooke told reporters.
Droughts, deadly bushfires, lightener events on the Great Barrier Reef, and floods have all become more common and intense in Australia as global weather patterns change.
Cooke described the floods as a “rapidly evolving situation,” warning that people should be “prepared to leave the area at short notice” as more wild weather is expected in the coming days.
She claimed that the city’s Warragamba Dam began to leak in the early hours of Sunday morning, well ahead of authorities’ predictions.
Floodwaters inundated local shops and a service station in Camden, a southwestern Sydney suburb of more than 100,000 people.
Cooke asked residents along a 500-kilometer (310-mile) stretch of Australia’s eastern seaboard, both north and the south of Sydney, to reconsider their school holiday travel plans due to the weather.
In the previous 24 hours, emergency services responded to 29 flood rescues and were called out more than 1,400 times, she said.
The east coast flooding event in March, which was caused by heavy storms that destroyed Sydney’s west, claimed the lives of 20 people.
