Windsor, Australia — Kelly Miller stood in her doorway, watching
the water rise to within a few centimeters of the century-old home where she
runs an alternative medicine business. The bridge nearby had already gone under
in some of Australia’s worst flooding in decades, along with an abandoned car
in the parking lot.
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“It’s coming up really quickly,” she said.
Two massive storms have converged over eastern Australia,
dumping more than 1m of rain in just five days. In a country that suffered
the worst wildfires in its recorded history just a year ago, the deluge has
become another record-breaker — a once-in-50-years event, or possibly 100,
depending on the rain that is expected to continue through.
Nearly 20,000 Australians have been forced to evacuate, and more
than 150 schools have been closed. The storms have swept away the home of a
couple on their wedding day, prompted at least 500 rescues and drowned roads
from Sydney up into the state of Queensland 805km north.
Shane Fitzsimmons, the resilience commissioner for New South
Wales — a new state position formed after last year’s fires — described the
event as another compounding disaster. Last year, huge fires combined into
history-making infernos that scorched an area larger than many European
countries. This year, thunderstorms have fused and hovered, delivering enough
water to push rivers like the Hawkesbury to their highest levels since the
1960s.
Scientists note that both forms of catastrophe represent
Australia’s new normal. The country is one of many seeing a pattern of
intensification — more extreme hot days and heat waves, as well as more extreme
rainfalls over short periods.
It is all tied to a warming earth, caused by greenhouse gases.
Because global temperatures have risen 1.1 degrees Celsius over preindustrial
levels, landscapes dry out more quickly, producing severe droughts, even as
more water vapor rises into the atmosphere, increasing the likelihood of
extreme downpours.
“There is a very strong link between global warming and that
intensification in rainfall,” said Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Center of
Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales. “There’s
good scientific evidence to say extreme rain is becoming more extreme due to
global warming.”
Australia’s conservative government — heavily resistant to
aggressive action on climate change that might threaten the country’s fossil
fuel industry — has yet to make that link.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has offered funds for those forced
to flee and several dozen areas have already been declared disaster zones.
“It’s another testing time for our country,” he told a Sydney
radio station, 2GB.
Windsor may become one of the places hardest hit. Over the
weekend, the Hawkesbury rose rapidly by more than 9m, and it is expected
to peak in the next day or so at 13m.
With rain continuing to fall, emergency workers wearing bright
orange went door to door on side streets with waist-deep puddles where the road
dipped.
In and around the historic downtown, many of the businesses
close to the river stayed shut Monday, with a few putting sandbags by their
doors. The central meeting place seemed to be at the foot of the Windsor
Bridge, where television crews and crowds in rubber boots marveled at the view.
The new Windsor Bridge, which opened just a few months ago as a “flood-proof”
replacement for an older bridge, was completely underwater.
It was built three meters higher than the bridge it replaced, but
the river flowed over it as if it did not exist. A red flashing light on the
top of a buried yellow excavator offered the only hint of the old bridge, or
what had once been solid ground.
Cameron Gooch, 46, a diesel mechanic from a town nearby, said he
saw huge trees speeding downriver toward the coast a day earlier. The water
seemed to have slowed down, he said, becoming a giant bathtub with water held
in place and rising slowly from tributaries.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “It’s just going to keep building
up.”
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