SYDNEY – Authorities have told townspeople in Australia’s southeast to flee homes with three days of supplies yesterday as a surging river threatened another community in the flooding crisis that has devastated the country’s mining industry.
Up to 1,500 homes in Kerang, in the north of Victoria state, could be affected if the Lodden river rises any further.
The flooding in Victoria follows weeks of massive flooding in north-eastern Queensland, which swamped two-thirds of the giant state, paralysed several mines and left 30 people dead.
One of the victims, a 13-year-old boy, was buried alongside his mother after becoming a national hero for insisting that rescuers first save his younger brother when their family car was gripped by a raging torrent of water.
Elsewhere in Queensland, authorities gave several of the state’s waterlogged coal mines special exemptions to environmental rules so they could pump water out into their already-flooded surroundings. The mining industry estimates the flooding has cost A$2.3 billion (€1.7 billion) in lost sales of coal, causing a shortage that has pushed up global prices.
In Victoria, more than 1,200km (750 miles) south of the Bowen Basin which holds most of Queensland’s coal mines, the Kerang levee breached at several points and people were urged to head for a relief centre on higher ground, state emergency service said.
“You should ensure you have left your property immediately,” the emergency service said in text message alerts sent to the town’s 2,500 residents.
Officials later said the levee was expected to hold, despite water pouring through it at several points. – (AP)