Thousands of people flee homes in 43 towns affected by rising waters
Water seeped on to the streets of rural communities in southern Australia today as the country's flood crisis threatened to deliver another region its worst deluge in a century.
Residents of Victoria state waited anxiously for rising waters in their towns to peak, after three weeks of flooding tore a devastating path through the north-eastern state of Queensland, in what could be the country's costliest natural disaster.
The region's Murray-Darling river basin links Queensland with New South Wales and Victoria to the south, and drains into the sea via South Australia on the south-central coast.
Queensland's premier, Anna Bligh, said the bodies of two more flood victims had been found, bringing the death count in the region to 30.
A spokeswoman for Victoria state emergency services, Natasha Duckett, warned that Horsham town could face a major flood during tomorrow's expected peak of the Wimmera river, and electricity supplier Powercor was sandbagging its substation there to ensure it remained dry. "The township could be bisected with a waterway right through the middle of town and the (Western) Highway cut," she said.
The Horsham municipal emergency resources officer, David Eltringham, said the town was expecting "a one-in-a-100-year flood". Up to 500 properties in the town of about 14,000 people could be affected.
More than 3,500 people have evacuated their homes in north-central Victoria state, with 43 towns and 1,500 properties affected by rising waters.
The flooding in Queensland left a vast territory under water and caused 30 deaths, most of them from a flash flood that hit towns west of the state capital, Brisbane, last Monday. Twelve people are missing.
Flooding has also spread from Queensland into New South Wales, where nearly 7,000 people are reliant on airdrops of food and other supplies after being isolated by floodwaters.
"It looks like this is possibly going to be, in economic terms, the largest natural disaster in our history," the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio. "It will involve billions of dollars of Commonwealth money and also state government money, and there's going to be impacts on local governments as well."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/17/australian-floods-victoria-state
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