Thousands fl ee in Australia fl oods

CANBERRA: Floods across eastern Australia forced more than 13,000 people to evacuate their homes today after recordhigh summer rains drenched three states over the past week, swelling rivers and forcing dams to overfl ow. In the worst-hit state of New South Wales, authorities ordered 8,000 people to leave their homes in the inland city of Wagga Wagga, where fl ood waters were expected to breach an 11-metre levee and swamp houses and the main business district. Thousands of people in Wagga Wagga moved to shelter at local schools, while the centre of the town, home to around 60,000 people, was deserted today. ‘If the levee is breached, we would expect signifi cant inundation and we would expect that to happen very quickly,’ State Emergency Service Assistant Commissioner Mark Murdoch told reporters. Heavy rains across Australia’s east over the past week also prompted fl ood warnings in the northern Queensland state, and in Victoria, where residents in some small towns have been warned to prepare to evacuate if conditions worsen. Two people have been killed in fl ood waters over the past week. The heavy rains fi lled Sydney’s Warragamba Dam, which overfl owed on the weekend for the fi rst time in 13 years, while Canberra’s Cotter Dam has fi lled with water spilling over a new dam wall currently under construction. The national government has made the military available to help with the fl oods, but said it was too early to determine the cost of damage or impact on the economy. ‘It is impossible to quantify economic damage until the fl ood waters subside,’ Prime Minister Julia Gillard told reporters in Canberra. But the Premier of New South Wales Barry O’Farrell earlier said the damage bill could be as high as a $500 million ($530 million). The fl ood waters, however, will not have a major impact on Australia’s major winter crops, which have already been harvested, the government’s chief commodities forecaster ABARES said on Tuesday. ‘Winter crop harvest was complete before the fl ooding happened,’ ABARES chief commodities analyst Jammie Penm told Reuters. ‘That’s the largest crop component in Australian production.