SYDNEY, Australia — Thousands of
Australians were ordered to
evacuate their homes in Sydney on Sunday as torrential rain battered the
country’s largest city and floodwaters inundated its outskirts.
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Roads across the
city were cut off and authorities said at least 18 evacuation orders were in
place in western
Sydney, an area that was inundated with severe flooding in
March.
“This is a
life-threatening emergency situation,” Stephanie Cooke, emergency services
minister for the state of New South Wales, told reporters.
Australia has
been at the sharp end of climate change, with droughts, deadly bushfires,
bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef and floods becoming more common and
intense as global weather patterns change.
With more wild
weather expected in the coming days, Cooke described the floods as a “rapidly
evolving situation” and warned that people should be “prepared to evacuate at
short notice”.
The city’s
Warragamba Dam began to spill in the early hours of Sunday morning, she said,
well ahead of authorities’ predictions.
While in Camden,
a southwestern suburb of Sydney home to more than 100,000 people, local shops
and a petrol station were inundated by floodwaters.
Cooke asked
those living along a 500km stretch of Australia’s east coast, both north and
south of Sydney, to consider cancelling their school holiday travel plans
because of the weather.
Emergency
services conducted 29 flood rescues and were called out more than 1,400 times
in the previous 24 hours, she said.
The east coast
flooding event in March — caused by heavy storms that devastated Sydney’s west
— claimed 20 lives.
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