Floods slam eastern seaboard AAP .. January 16, 2011 12:01AM
SAFE BUT SOGGY: Dorothy Robertson, 81, is re-united with her cat, Puss, in the sodden wreckage of her Carisbrook home in central western Victoria. Floods are affecting communities in all four eastern seaboard states. Picture: Rob Leeson Source: Herald Sun
AUSTRALIA'S Federal Government is monitoring flood crises in four states and has offered additional financial assistance to disaster victims.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard also says she is ready to utilise direct help from US President Barack Obama for clean-up operations in flood-ravaged Queensland.
Floodwaters have swamped Queensland as well as parts of NSW and Victoria and have even hit Tasmania, with many communities just beginning to see swollen rivers subside.
Ms Gillard said Mr Obama rung her to say he was thinking of Australia "at this very difficult time" as it battled a major natural disaster with floods over much of its eastern seaboard.
"I've specifically spoken to President Obama about the kind of assistance we might need as we move into the recovery phase, and we will be working with the US on their expertise which may be able to assist us in this period," Ms Gillard said as she toured the northern NSW town of Grafton with Attorney-General Robert McClelland on Saturday.
Ms Gillard said that included "expertise that can come to the Australian military about the kind of manpower and specific capability they may have to assist Queensland as it moves into reconstruction and recovery".
She also announced that the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment would be available to people impacted by flooding in disaster-declared Local Government Areas in the Northern Region of NSW and the Clarence Valley LGA.
The AGDRP is a one-off payment of $1000 per eligible adult and $400 per eligible child to help them recover.
"This assistance is being extended to parts of northern NSW as we experience unprecedented flooding in large parts of Australia," Ms Gillard said.
That announcement is over and above the Federal Government's Disaster Income Recovery Subsidy - a payment for employees, small-business owners and farmers whose ability to work has been affected by the flooding.
Ms Gillard also said she was "very concerned" about people battling massive flooding in northern Victoria and would visit the affected area on Monday, saying she wanted "to be able to say hello to people in those circumstances".
NEW SOUTH WALES
MORE than 7000 people remain isolated in northern NSW from devastating floodwaters that have begun to ease.
Entire towns have been evacuated, but a cyclone off the coast of flood-ravaged Queensland is expected to spare NSW and not bring any additional rain, the NSW State Emergency Service says.
The 'all clear' has been given for communities evacuated along the Clarence River on the NSW north coast but residents at Yamba and Iluka will remain cut off until Monday or Tuesday.
A total of 6000 people were isolated by floodwaters as of Saturday afternoon.
"We're still resupplying them by flood boat," SES spokesman Phil Campbell said.
"Water levels are falling in some areas, which means we can get high-clearance four-wheel drives in now but it's still not safe for members of the public to use some of the back roads at the Clarence Valley."
In NSW, 63 local government areas have been declared natural disaster areas since December as a result of flooding but the situation is set to improve.
"In NSW, the state is transitioning from the response phase to the recovery and resupply phase," Mr Campbell said.
Most of the 650 residents of Boggabilla, near the Queensland border, had been evacuated by the time the Macintyre River peaked at 12.6m at midday on Friday.
"About 30 people remain in Boggabilla, but those people are isolated. They're in a part of a town that's safe and on high ground," Mr Campbell said.
He said 30 per cent of the town was submerged, swamping backyards and a caravan park.
All of the 200 residents in the nearby town of Toomelah had left, and the SES said a number of properties had been cut off by floodwaters.
Further west, the village of New Angledool became isolated last Sunday.
The river there had passed the previous record of 2.87m and was slowly rising towards a peak of 3.1m.
At least 36 residents in the town became isolated.
In far west NSW, the 350 residents of Goodooga are isolated and expected to remain that way for another four to eight weeks.
The SES will continue to resupply the town by helicopter and is monitoring downstream communities including Bourke, Louth, Tilpa, Wilcannia and Menindee.
In the Broken Hill region, several hundred farmers were stranded from heavy rains that battered Victoria on Friday.
Some of the hardest-hit areas included Wilcannia, White Cliffs and Menindee.
"The dirt roads are still closed in western NSW," Mr Campbell said.
VICTORIA
THE torrential rain may have stopped but Victorian rivers are still on the rise and more towns are likely to be evacuated over the next few days as unprecedented flooding continues, say emergency services.
SES state controller Trevor White said 12 towns in Victoria's north and northwest had been evacuated during the crisis which began on Tuesday and a similar number could be expected to be impacted.
The Murray River holiday town of Echuca is threatened because of floodwaters raging down the Campaspe River, which flows into the Murray.
The SES was conducting a community meeting in Echuca on Saturday with residents given advice on the expected impact of flooding on the town over the next few days.
A relief centre has opened at Echuca Secondary College.
"We will continue to see extensive rural flooding over the next four to five days and we will see people isolated," Mr White told reporters.
"The situation is far from over, we have more flooding to impact on communities as yet.
"We are advising them that if they stay they may not have essential services such as power, communication and water."
Those who elected to stay at Rochester, a dairy town and the home of cycling legend Sir Hubert Opperman and which is experiencing its worst flood in the town's history, are running out of water.
At the local hospital, 65 patients were transferred to medical centres outside the flood zone.
Bendigo Hospital accepted 24 acute and aged-care patients.
Rochester was split in half by the flooded Campaspe River with its peak not expected to be reached until later on Saturday night or early Sunday morning.
About 200 properties, or 80 per cent of the community, are inundated, with warnings that river levels will be much higher than previously expected.
The Loddon, Avoca, Campaspe, Glenelg and Wimmera rivers all have major flood warnings.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has been comforting Queensland flood victims, says she's "very concerned" about people battling massive flooding in Victoria and is expected to visit the area on Monday.
Kevin Parkyn, senior forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, says an unprecedented amount of rain has fallen in the state this week.
"Victoria is experiencing one of its worst flood events in its history," Mr Parkyn said.
"It's been a week in which rainfall totals have been smashed in parts of Victoria."
A summer's worth of rain has fallen in a period of five days with up to 200 millimetres in some parts of the state.
Maryborough received 222mm, Inglewood near Bendigo 216mm, Kyneton 263mm and the Wimmera community of Jeparit copped 161mm in a 24-hour period.
"The flooding is far worse than we experienced in September with four to five times the number of properties impacted," Mr Parkyn said.
More than 1000 properties and in excess of 3000 people in the north to northwest of Victoria have been affected so far with up to 8000 properties losing power.
About 400 properties at Charlton in north central Victoria have been flooded and much of the town evacuated.
Supplier Powercor said the substation at Charlton was underwater and could not make any guarantees on when power would be restored.
Tyrell Creek is expected to bring record water levels to the tiny township of Culgoa, where residents have been warned to leave their properties if they are in low-lying areas or near the creek.
A relief centre has been established at the Sea Lake Sports Complex.
TASMANIA
SOME of Tasmania's heaviest-ever rain has forced the evacuation of residents across the state, with rivers and dams bursting their banks.
The state has been lashed with the same storm front that has hit most of the east coast of Australia, with parts of the state receiving record-breaking daily rainfall totals.
SES spokeswoman Sharon Sherman said residents were evacuated in the towns of Wynyard, Railton and Chudleigh in the state's northwest, where several homes were inundated.
The power was turned off at Chudleigh to reduce the electrical hazard.
The banks of Blackwood Creek burst, which isolated parts of Bracknell, south of Launceston.
A dam breached at Castra, near Devonport, forcing the evacuation of a number of low-lying homes nearby, Ms Sherman said.
Elsewhere, a tourist was stranded when a bridge was washed out at Meander Falls, near Deloraine, Forestry Tasmania said.
FT spokesman Bob Hamilton said the man had sufficient food and supplies and was "happy to wait a few days while FT works to find a way out".
Meanwhile, a nursing home in Penguin was evacuated, but police said it was a "precautionary measure".
Conditions improved on the east coast on Friday, after floodwaters that cut off the tourist town of St Helens on Thursday subsided.
Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett, who toured flood-affected regions on Saturday, said the Queensland floods put the situation in Tasmania into perspective.
"While I know it is having a big impact on families, businesses and communities, it is nowhere near the scale and the scope of the Queensland tragedy," he told reporters in Hobart.
"Having said that, we are dealing with some serious flooding."
Mr Bartlett said the total damage bill would not be known until the waters receded, but said the floods had taken their toll on roads, rather than houses.
"It's highly likely that out of the recent couple of days' incidents in Tasmania, it'll be infrastructure such as roads, stormwater drains and other facilities that will need repair," he said.
"But I don't have an accurate picture of that yet."
Insurance company RACT said it had received more than 100 calls from customers, mainly on the east coast.
In Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, plow operators are dealing with some of the deepest snow seen in years. Above, 23 feet of snow on Trail Ridge Road. National Park Service, via Associated Press
In California, officials staged three days of flood training last week, including on Twitchell Island in the Sacramento Delta. Annie Tritt for The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and JESSE McKINLEY Published: May 21, 2011
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — For all the attention on epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley, a quiet threat has been growing here in the West where winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges throughout the region.
Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.
Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not.
Fear of a sudden thaw, releasing millions of gallons of water through river channels and narrow canyons, has disaster experts on edge.
“All we can do is watch and wait,” said Bob Struble, the director of emergency management for Routt County in north-central Colorado. The county’s largest community, Steamboat Springs, sits about 30 miles from the headwaters of the Yampa River, a major tributary of the Colorado River that has 17 feet of snow or more in parts of its watershed.
“This could be a year to remember,” Mr. Struble added in a recent interview in his office as snow fell again on the high country.
But the West has also changed significantly since 1983, when super-snows last produced widespread flooding. From the foothills west of Denver to the scenic, narrow canyons of northern Utah, flood plains that were once wide-open spaces have been built up.
Many communities have improved their defenses, for example, by fortifying riverbanks to keep streams in place, but those antiflood bulwarks have for the most part not been tested by nature’s worst hits.
And in sharp contrast to the floods on the Mississippi River — one mighty waterway, going where it will — the Western story is fragmented, with anxiety dispersed across dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of large and small waterways that could surge individually, collectively or not at all.
¶ In California, officials staged three days of flood training last week, running disaster scenarios and practicing the grunt work of filling sandbags and draping and tying down tarp. The state’s aging levee system has long been a source of concern, with fears of large-scale failures that could leave Sacramento, the state capital, vulnerable to a Hurricane Katrina-scale flood. The anxieties are amplified this year by the deep snows in the Sierra Nevada, where some ski spots around Lake Tahoe saw more than 60 feet this season.
¶ At Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah, federal managers have begun spilling water downstream in preparation for the rising waters; the reservoir has 700,000 acre-feet of available space, but will have an expected inflow of 1.4 million acre-feet more through July, federal officials said.
¶ In the Wasatch Mountains outside Salt Lake City, where Alta Ski Resort still has about 200 inches of snow, cool temperatures have kept snowpacks from crossing what hydrologists call the isothermal barrier — 32 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the snowmass — which allows gradual melting from the bottom. Three more feet of snow piled on just last week.
¶ In sparsely populated Wyoming, emergency officials are worried about tiny communities that in many cases are far from help if rivers surge; almost every county is in a potential snow-melt flood zone, and relatively few residents have flood insurance.
¶ Here in Routt County, the terrain itself has changed, with thousands of acres of dead lodgepole pine trees on high mountain slopes. The trees were killed by an infestation of beetles in recent years and no longer hold the soil as they once did, raising erosion concerns.
Hydrologists, meanwhile, are cheering what they say will be a huge increase in water reservoir storage for tens of millions of people across the West. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, two huge dammed reservoirs on the Colorado River battered in recent years by drought, are projected to get 1.5 trillion gallons of new water between them from the mammoth melt.
But from Sacramento to Baggs, Wyo., a town of about 600 people on the Little Snake River, 150 miles west of Cheyenne, looking upslope in May and seeing lots of white is scary.
Late spring is a volatile time in the mountains, when freezing temperatures can turn overnight to heat waves and thunderstorms. And every day that the snows do not go gently down the stream raises the possibility of melting into late June and even July, when sudden mountain downpours can set off flash floods, dangerous even without a freight of snow behind them.
Floods kill more Americans than lightning, tornados or hurricanes in an average year, according to federal figures [ http://www.weather.gov/om/hazstats.shtml ]. And flash floods [ http://www.fema.gov/business/guide/section3c.shtm ], usually associated with summer downpours, like the one that killed more than 140 people in Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado in 1976, can come as if from nowhere.
“It just takes one really sunny hot spell to get things running,” said Arthur Hinojosa, the chief of the Hydrology and Flood Operations Office with the California Department of Water Resources. “And that’s where our concern lies.”
Mr. Hinojosa added that the state had ample storage and diversion facilities to the north of Sacramento, where the city’s namesake river runs, but that that is less true of the San Joaquin River, which wends through the state’s agriculturally rich Central Valley to the south.
Several major tributaries, including the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers, spill into the San Joaquin, which runs north into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a collection of low-lying islands and waterways that serve as farmland, a recreation zone and the pumping location for water-hungry farms and residents to the south.
On Wednesday, as part of the California flood training, several dozen disaster officials and workers descended on Twitchell Island, a 3,500-acre delta depression, where land can sit up to 20 feet below sea level. Scores of homes also sit below levees, which hold back water and create marinas, adding the surreal scene of sailboats bobbing above the roofs of houses and farmland.
Some disaster officials say it is the clock that is driving them crazy — every day of postponed melt being cause for a sigh of relief and heightened anxiety from the looming June warmth.
But lingering snows are proving a bonus for others. Arapahoe Basin and Aspen ski areas in Colorado, for example, plan to keep their chairlifts running on some weekends, in Arapahoe’s case, through at least June 19.
Kirk Johnson reported from Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Jesse McKinley from Twitchell Island, Calif.
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