Australian east coast lashed by freak storm

Sydney // The east coast of Australia, including Sydney, was battered by a freak storm on Sunday that left up to 26,000 homes without power and forced hundreds of people to flee their homes.

The wild storm struck New South Wales after wreaking havoc in Queensland state on Saturday, uprooting trees and bringing on heavy rains, gales and rough seas.

Hundreds of people were evacuated from homes across NSW and motorists trapped on roads had to be rescued as floodwaters rose, the state emergency service said.

Gusts exceeding 90 kilometres per hour were recorded with forecasts of “locally destructive” winds of up to 125kph in some parts of the state, the bureau of meteorology said.

The extreme weather prompted Sydney Airport to close two of its three runaways, and forced a Qantas Airways flight from Shanghai to land at a military air base. Domestic and international flights were also affected.

“NSW forecasters can’t recall having a floodwatch for the entire east coast of NSW in the last 30 years,” senior meteorologist Adam Morgan of the bureau of meteorology’s extreme weather section said.

An east-coast low usually affects only a local region intensely. The current weather system, however, was “very unusual” as it has tracked along the coastline, affecting four states particularly NSW which has a 2,000-kilometre long shoreline, Mr Morgan said.

“It’s really affected a very large proportion of Australia’s population given that a large percentage of Australians live along the eastern seaboard,” he said.

In a 24-hour period to Sunday morning, the weather bureau said there were widespread rainfalls of between 100-200 millimetres, with the highest-recorded level recorded at Wooli River at 469 millimetres.

Victoria state and the southern island state of Tasmania also experienced a deluge of rain.

At the same time, the east-coast low is coinciding with a king tide, the highest tide of the year, leading to serious erosion on Sydney’s northern beaches.

“The fact that we are getting a storm event at the exact same time as those king tides creates this perfect scenario for coastal erosion,” Mitchell Harley from the University of New South Wales said, adding that it was the worst erosion in three decades.

While storm conditions usually generate waves of up to eight metres, individual waves of up to 13 metres have been recorded this weekend, he said.

Wild weather was expected to continue throughout Sunday and flood warnings remained in place for towns along the east coast. Conditions were due to ease on Monday.

* Agence France-Presse and Reuters