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Australian ‘inland sea’ flood threatens towns
MELBOURNE — Australia’s flood crisis deepened Saturday with a giant “inland sea” threatening more communities in the southeast, as officials continued the grim search for bodies in worst-hit Queensland.
Sandbagging was underway in some villages in Victoria, where weeks of floods have affected as much as one-third of the state, with swollen rivers overflowing in 75 towns and flooding some 1,770 properties.
“We know that this is the most significant flooding in the north west of Victoria since records began… about 130 years ago,” a spokeswoman for the State Emergency Service told AFP.
“We are still on alert for towns in the north of the state.”
Floodwaters which national broadcaster ABC described as a moving “inland sea” covering an area 90 kilometres (56 miles) long and 40 kilometres wide, were threatening towns around Swan Hill, some 300 kilometres northwest of Melbourne.
“In the actual Swan Hill township itself, we are very confident that the levee system around the town is built to a very high grade and will protect the township,” Mayor Greg Cruickshank told ABC radio.
But rural and outlying areas “will have significant amount of inundation through them,” he said.
While thousands of people around the state have been urged to evacuate, emergency services warned that those people who choose to remain on their properties in the rural areas could be stranded by the floods.
“A number of these communities will be isolated for days as this huge amount of floodwater comes through,” SES spokesman Kevin Monk said. Read more…
Northeast Snowstorm Next Week will Pack a Big Punch
More and more signs are pointing toward a major storm along much of the Atlantic Seaboard next week, meaning a wind-whipped snow for some areas and wind-driven rain for others.
The storm could rank right up there with the Christmas Weekend Blizzard and could hit part of the same area, or different areas farther inland. No matter what, it looks like a “big deal.”
While the storm will have its nasty moments over the Rockies, Plains and part of the Midwest this weekend into early next week, it will be at its worst along the Atlantic Seaboard, where it is forecast to markedly strengthen. Arctic air building into the Northeast will also be a major factor in the big storm that will unfold.
Storm Track(s)
The key for what the weather will be in your area is the exact track of the storm.
A track along or just inland of the coast would bring rain over the eastern Carolinas and even a wintry mix into the I-95 corridor of the mid-Atlantic. This track would dump heavy snow, perhaps on the order of 1 to 2 feet, over the Appalachians. Snowfall rates would be intense with perhaps 1 to 3 inches per hour.
A track just off the coast would bring the heaviest snow to the I-95 cities and the beaches, as we have seen before, thus sparing the Appalachians the worst.
It is also possible the storm could swing out off the southern Atlantic coast, then hook back in over the Northeast with a more complex precipitation pattern.
No matter which way the storm tracks, it looks like big trouble for the Atlantic Seaboard next week, not only for the U.S., but all the way to Atlantic Canada. Read more…
ARkStorm: California’s Other ‘Big One’
For emergency planning purposes, scientists unveiled a hypothetical California scenario that describes a storm that could produce up to 10 feet of rain, cause extensive flooding (in many cases overwhelming the state’s flood-protection system) and result in more than $300 billion in damage.
The “ARkStorm Scenario,” prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey and released at the ARkStorm Summit in Sacramento on Jan. 13-14, combines prehistoric geologic flood history in California with modern flood mapping and climate-change projections to produce a hypothetical, but plausible, scenario aimed at preparing the emergency response community for this type of hazard.
The USGS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Emergency Management Agency convened the two-day summit to engage stakeholders from across California to take action as a result of the scenario’s findings, which were developed over the last two years by more than 100 scientists and experts.
“The ARkStorm scenario is a complete picture of what that storm would do to the social and economic systems of California,” said Lucy Jones, chief scientist of the USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project and architect of ARkStorm. “We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes. The ARkStorm is essentially two Read more…
Brisbane on edge ahead of catastrophic flood peak
Authorities are urging people to stay calm as Brisbane and Ipswich prepare for unprecedented flooding over the next two days.
Heavy rain, releases from the giant Wivenhoe Dam and high tides will combine to cause major flood peaks in both cities in the next couple of days, with river levels rising above the historic 1974 floods.
And a four-year-old boy’s death in Ipswich has taken the Queensland floods death toll to 10.
“We are facing one of our toughest ever tests, we will only pass this test if we are calm,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said.
“Now is not a time for panic, it is a time for us to stick together.”
Authorities say about 6,500 properties could be flooded as the Bremer and Brisbane rivers hit hits record levels over the next two days.
As panicked residents strip supermarket shelves bare, Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson says people should stay calm.
“Stay calm but act wisely and if you’re in doubt, evacuate to friends or evacuate, don’t take any unnecessary risks,” he said.
The Brisbane River is predicted to rise to 3 metres tonight, 4.5 metres tomorrow and is likely to peak higher than the 1974 floods that reached 5.45 metres.
Large parts of Brisbane are already affected by flooding. A number of shops Read more…
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