Australia's third-largest city started cleaning up stinking mud and debris today after some of the country's worst floods on record, but it could take six months to pump flood waters out of Queensland's coal mines.
Many suburbs in the state's capital Brisbane, a city of two million people, remained submerged after flood waters inundated the riverside city on yesterday.
The floods in Queensland, which started in December 2010, have killed 19 people. Tens of thousands of homes have been inundated with floodwater and more than 60 people are missing.
"Right now we are still rescuing people, we are still evacuating people. So we are right in the middle of the emergency response," said Queensland state premier Anna Bligh, who has described Brisbane as looking like a war zone. "We need to brace ourselves, when this goes down and its going down quite quickly, its going to stink - an unbearable stench," said Ms Bligh.
The disaster has crippled Queensland's infrastructure and its coal exports, pushing up world prices by around a third.
The event has been blamed on the strongest ever recorded La Nina weather phenomenon in the Pacific, which has also affected other countries.
Ms Bligh said her government would concentrate efforts to help the state coal industry meet demand in Asia, after Commonwealth Bank estimated the floods would remove 14 million tonnes, or 5 per cent, of global coking coal exports this year.
Military aircraft and trucks fanned out across Queensland state, ferrying food and clothing over an area the size of South Africa, as the weather bureau warned the threat of cyclones and fresh rains would last until March.
But a cyclone forming in the Coral Sea, which had threatened the coast, had begun moving north into the Pacific, said Ms Bligh.
Elsewhere, heavy monsoon rains and flooding across a third of Sri Lanka have killed 23 people, forced 100,000 to leave their homes and threatened food supplies on the island. Sri Lanka's agricultural ministry said at least a fifth of the nation's rice crop had been destroyed, raising concerns over supply shocks and higher food inflation.
Reuters