Large parts of Outback Australia have seen huge dumps of heavy rain that have flooded roads and tracks and cut off remote communities.
Travellers are being warned to take extra care and to ensure they are fully aware of road and weather conditions before setting off on any trips … and that they are carrying adequate supplies and equipment.
The potential perils were graphically highlighted this week when a group pf five people found themselves in a life-threatening situation when their vehicle became badly bogged in flooded north-west Queensland.
Three of the party then took off on a 12-hour, 50-kilometre walk to Mount Isa to summon help, and the RACQ LifeFlight Rescue helicopter was then able to go back to rescue a father and his 10-year-old son from the roof of their ute.
The pair were uninjured and flown back to Mount Isa in good spirits.
Pilot Russell Proctor told the ABC that the pair did everything right in a tough situation.
“They had water with them,” he said. “Despite having to wait such a long time to be rescued, they remained with their vehicle until help arrived.”
It’s been a similarly wet story in parts of the NT where hundreds of people have been cut off and isolated in the central Australian desert following heavy rainfall in the region.
Some 160 millimetres has fallen in the Utopia homelands north-east of Alice Springs, flooding roadways and knocking out local Telstra services. The Sandover highway, which connects the Utopia homelands to Alice Springs, has been closed for more than a week because of the flooding, cutting the community off from its closest major service centre.
And the Bureau of Meteorology says much of Australia can expect a wet end to the year, with thunder and rain storms predicted across the eastern half of the continent.
It says the east coast and parts of the inland areas could be battered by severe thunderstorms, damaging winds and heavy rain this week. Those showers will drench Queensland and New South Wales, and push into Victoria by New Year’s Eve, before continuing south to Tasmania and southeast South Australia.
The Bureau told the ABC that the wet weather across the east is a result of La Nina … a weather phenomenon linked to the shifting pattern of sea surface temperatures through the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
