Storms in Australia Leave at Least 9 Dead
At least nine people were found dead in Australia after storms and floods in the eastern part of the country caused power outages and damaged infrastructure over the Christmas holiday period, the authorities said.
Queensland was hardest hit.
The extreme weather has mainly affected people in the eastern states of Queensland and Victoria. Even as rainfall tapered on Wednesday, search and rescue operations continued in flooded areas, and power crews were trying to restore electricity to tens of thousands of customers.
The Queensland authorities have linked at least seven deaths to the storms, including a woman killed by a falling tree on the Gold Coast, a region south of Brisbane, on Monday and three men whose bodies were found after motorboat carrying 11 people overturned on Tuesday in Moreton Bay, near Brisbane. (The other eight people were rescued.)
Emergency workers also found the bodies of two women during a search operation in a flooded river north of Brisbane, as well as the body of a 9-year-old girl who had gone missing during flooding in a suburb south of the city, the police said on Wednesday.
More than 60,000 electricity customers were still without power in southeastern Queensland on Wednesday, according to the energy utility Energex.
Victoria felt impacts, too.
The storms this week also caused damage and death in the southeastern state of Victoria, which includes Melbourne.
Two people died when a campground about 200 miles east of Melbourne flooded on Tuesday, the local news media reported. The police confirmed one of the deaths, adding that several vehicles in the campground area were underwater when emergency workers arrived.
Separately, a woman and her dog were rescued on Tuesday after being swept downstream in a river in the Melbourne area. Neither was seriously injured.
Several flood watches and warnings remained in effect across Victoria late Wednesday, even as rainfall in the area let up, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.
How is this connected to climate change?
Not every extreme weather event can be immediately attributed to global warming, but scientists have repeatedly warned that heating up the planet will bring higher temperatures, wildfires, droughts and intense rainfall, among other things. An additional risk these days is that El Niño, a natural weather pattern that can play out over several years, will further aggravate weather extremes around the world.
Australia has already experienced a lot of extreme weather in recent months, including a very dry early autumn, a wetter-than-average November and an early-arriving tropical cyclone in December.
Now, as summer begins in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia is heading into wildfire season. Experts say it could prove to be the worst for the country since the deadly blazes of 2019 and 2020, which killed hundreds of people and left tens of thousands of acres charred.
