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The death toll from Australia’s east coast floods rose to 20 on Tuesday, after the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered in floodwaters in Sydney.
The pair were thought to be a missing mother and son whose car had been abandoned in a stormwater canal, according to police.
Tens of thousands of Sydney residents were ordered to evacuate their homes Tuesday after severe storms and flash flooding inundated large swaths of Australia’s largest city.
The national weather service predicted a “tough 48 hours” for Sydney, with 60,000 people under evacuation orders and warnings and the city’s Manly Dam beginning to spill.
In Sydney, heavy rain flooded bridges and homes, washed away cars, and even collapsed the roofs of a shopping center and a supermarket.
Vehicles were semi-submerged in the riverside suburb of Georges Hall, and police had to rescue people stranded in their cars due to rising floodwaters.
– A ‘wet’ Black Summer
State emergency services have been stretched thin as torrential rain and intense storms have continued into a second week, with flood warnings in effect for New South Wales’ entire 2,000-kilometer (1,250-mile) coastline on Tuesday.
“It’s very much the watery equivalent of the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires,” AFP’s Phil Campbell, an emergency services spokesperson, said.
The scale of the damage to property and wildlife in the last week has been comparable to the devastating bushfires that ravaged Australia’s east for months in late 2019 and early 2020, he said.
“We’ve had a similar effect on communities in terms of dislocation, with roads closed, infrastructure damaged, and power outages,” Campbell explained.
Over the last 24 hours, emergency services have been called to 100 flood rescues across the state, with the number expected to rise as the full force of the storms bears down on Sydney on Tuesday.
Flood researchers in the city’s north were evacuated from their lab as water from the nearby Manly Dam began to spill into suburban areas.
The University of New South Wales facility uses dam water to conduct large-scale experiments on one-in-100-year and one-in-1,000-year flooding scenarios.
“Ironically, the conditions were occurring right outside,” AFP researcher Mitchell Harley explained.
Floodwaters were already rising when he arrived at work in the morning, but the downpour quickly caused “significant flooding” in the lab.
“We haven’t seen impacts of that magnitude in the laboratory’s 60-year history,” Harley said.
