Tornado-strength winds are possible along the north Queensland coast today as Townsville’s flood emergency continues after record-breaking rainfall over the city and surrounds during the past week.
Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) state manager Bruce Gunn said six-hour rain totals of 150-200 millimetres were predicted along the coast from Ingham to Bowen today, accompanied by strong wind gusts.
“There is some chance of tornadoes forming in that onshore flow,” he said.
“As the convergence lines feed into the monsoonal low and cross the coast, there is enough favourable wind sheer to make that possible.
“So we are putting out a heads-up, I guess, for the possibility of those destructive winds associated with storms of that size, of that type. We’ve used the cyclone siren a few times in this event.”
Mr Gunn said 1,012mm of rain fell on Townsville Airport over the seven days to 9:00am, “smashing” the previous weekly rainfall record of 886mm, set in 1998.BOM forecaster Dean Narramore said at 11:30am, there had been some extraordinary rainfall numbers coming in for the Townsville area, with a number of locations receiving over a metre of rain over in the last seven days.
Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill said at 12:15pm 10,000 people were without power and about 200 were in the city’s evacuation centres.
Around 1:00pm police reported the Ross River had broken its banks in the suburb of Aitkenvale, which is close to the already-flooded suburbs of Rosslea and Hermit Park.
Councillor Hill said about 1,000 cubic metres of water a second is still going over the Ross River Dam spillway.
By midday, the dam had risen above 231 per cent capacity, while a severe storm warning at 12:43pm noted “intense” rain falling over the catchment.
“We don’t know how much rain is still likely to flow into the Ross River Dam catchment,” Cr Hill said.
“We cannot give you any certainty about what we are going to need to do into the future.
“I’d rather have 20,000 homes with sandbags and plastic in preparation, people ready, and only affect a small number.”
The Army is delivering 90,000 sandbags to affected Townsville homes today.
Townsville disaster coordinator Assistant Chief Superintendent Steve Munro said there were 82,000 houses in Townsville and flood modelling predicted up to a quarter would be affected by flooding in the worst-case scenario.
“At the moment, we have probably got 400, 500 [homes] affected [by flooding],” he said.
“The modelling says what it is going to say — it could move up to the 10,000, 20,000 [homes]. We don’t want to get to that stage (but) we can’t control that.”
Earlier, Townsville’s flood emergency was declared a catastrophe by the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA).
ICA spokesman Campbell Fuller said the Townsville flood had been declared a catastrophe and almost 2,000 claims had already been lodged.
“Under the declaration, claims from affected policy holders in Townsville will be given priority by insurers, those claims will be triaged as well to direct urgent assistance to the worst affected property owners,” he said.
Thousands of homes have been abandoned in Townsville’s flooded suburbs and authorities have been conducting numerous evacuations throughout the morning.
But the city had a brief reprieve overnight as the heaviest rainfall was recorded further north.
It was a night of torrential rain and damaging winds for Ingham, Tully and Halifax.More than 500 millimetres of rain was dumped on Ingham over 12 hours, with 415mm falling on nearby Halifax since 9:00am yesterday.In the past 24 hours, 236mm has fallen near Tully, while Paluma received 260mm.
BOM forecaster Adam Blazak said 145mm fell in Ingham in just one hour.”Extremely heavy rainfall. It managed to just dodge the Townsville dam, so that worked out quite well,” he said.Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) chief superintendent Lance Duncan said swift water specialists remained on alert, with warnings of more torrential rain and flash flooding between Ingham, Townsville and Bowen over the next two days.”QFES has assisted in 220 relocations of people from their residences,” he said.”The SES has received about 570 requests for assistance and that’s just over the last 24 hours and working with the Defence Force too, the SES [distributing] 20,000 sandbags in the Townsville area.”
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BOM forecaster Sam Campbell said the monsoon trough was moving slowly to the south, which would bring more rain to Townsville and the Herbert and Lower Burdekin area.
“We’ll start to see the rainfall rates increasing in the Townsville area,” he said.
“We’ll probably see that last for a few hours as that burst of activity moves through. And then we could see another burst of activity in the evening hours.”
There have also been more falls in western Queensland.
Julius Dam near Mount Isa in the state’s north-west received 199mm in the past 24 hours.
Mount Isa and Cloncurry have received 50 to 80mm and further heavy falls are expected today and tomorrow..abc.net
