12/26/2023 3:21 pm (current 12/26/2023 3:21 pm)
At least two people have died in severe storms in eastern Australia. On the Gold Coast, south of Brisbane, a 59-year-old woman was killed by a falling tree during a storm, Queensland state police said, according to local media reports on Tuesday. Additionally, five people are missing in the region, including a nine-year-old girl who was swept away by the floods.
In the town of Caringal, east of Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, a man was fatally injured by a falling branch. The storm also caused a boat carrying ten people to capsize off the coast of Brisbane, he said. Eight could have been saved, two are still missing. In Queensland, around 120,000 households were left without electricity due to storm damage to power lines, the local utility said. The Australian Meteorological Service has been warning for days of heavy rain and thunderstorms across almost the entire east coast. At Christmas, heavy rain caused flash flooding in the Sydney metropolis, with streets and buildings submerged. In other places it was raining. The storms are expected to ease on Wednesday.
The west of the huge continent, on the other hand, is plagued by droughts and forest fires. A member of the volunteer fire department was said to have died in an operation southeast of the Perth metropolis. The young man fell from a fire truck on Tuesday for unknown reasons. Several fires are active in the state of Western Australia, whose capital is Perth. Large parts of the state recently experienced an unseasonal heat wave with record-breaking temperatures.
Australia is particularly affected by climate change. A February 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report assumes the country will be hit by devastating natural events even more frequently in the future.