Severe rains and flash flooding swamped swaths of Australia’s largest metropolis on Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands of Sydney residents to flee their homes.
According to emergency services, 60,000 people are subject to evacuation orders and warnings across the impacted areas, as the national weather bureau predicted “a difficult 48 hours ahead” for the metropolis.
On Tuesday, the death toll from a week of “extraordinary” floods that ravaged most of Australia’s east coast increased to 18, as police continued their hunt for a mother and kid whose car was discovered abandoned in a drainage canal in Sydney’s flood-ravaged west.
“It’s very much the watery equivalent of the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires,” emergency services spokesperson Phil Campbell told AFP.
The magnitude of property and wildlife devastation in the previous week was comparable to the destructive bushfires that plagued Australia’s east for months in late 2019 and early 2020, he added.
