Surf lifesavers from Sydney’s beaches have been rushed to the Australian outback as the nation’s longest river, swollen by months of intense rainfall, inundates homes, farms and vineyards.
Despite the world’s driest inhabited continent enduring new year temperatures nudging 40C , the 1,500-mile Murray River has been closed to swimmers and most boats, with the waters reaching levels never before recorded.
The military has been brought into South Australia to help with emergency evacuations amid official forecasts that thousands of properties are threatened by the state’s worst flooding in almost 70 years. Officials have described the crisis as a slow-moving disaster, brought on by heavy rainfall over the eastern Australian states of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
In the historic outback town of Menindee, 620 miles west of Sydney, residents were warned to flee their homes on Friday as the Darling river rose to record levels. “It’s a massive amount of water that’s just appeared from nowhere,” Rob Gregory, president of the region’s tourist association, said. “A lot of people are stressing out a hell of a lot, mate,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Hundreds of volunteers are helping to sandbag buildings, including surf lifesavers from Sydney’s popular eastern and southern beaches, who will also be on hand for rescues.
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Ancient Aboriginal burial grounds and rock shelters are among at least 700 cultural heritage sites in the path of the floodwaters, prompting a warning on Saturday from the authorities that people must not interfere with any uncovered skeletons.
Millions of Australians have experienced widespread flooding over the past year. In Sydney, Australia’s largest city, more rain has fallen this year than in any other since record-keeping began 130 years ago.
The earth is saturated, causing floodwaters to cascade into the Murray, which rises in the Australian Alps and meanders across the nation’s inland plains, forming the border between the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria. Thousands of people in towns and on farms and vineyards along the Murray in South Australia have raced to build sand levees as the swollen river reaches breaking point.
Two climatic phenomena, La Niña, the cooling of parts of the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean Dipole, the gap between eastern and western Indian Ocean surface temperatures, are blamed for the flooding. Influenced by warmer ocean temperatures, they have caused the heavy rainfall across much of Australia. Scientists believe they are exacerbated by climate change.
The unprecedented rains have triggered an insurance crisis as companies, battered by claims, hike premiums or even withdraw insurance cover in some regions, prompting questions about whether they will continue to be habitable. Over the past two years there have been 788,000 claims, equivalent to one for every 25 adults.
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Climate scientists have little doubt about the cause. “The fingerprints of climate change, which drives more intense storms and downpours, are on the Great Deluge of 2022,” said the independent Australian Climate Council in its end-of-year climate change review.
