After four days of battering by extreme storms, South Australia is bracing for more rain
UPDATE: A severe thunderstorm and damaging wind warning has been issued for parts of SA as the big mop-up from last week’s wild conditions continues.
- LIVE COVERAGE: Latest on the floods crisis
- FORECAST: More heavy rain on its way
READ BELOW: Business anger over stock dump
READ BELOW: Long road ahead for regional communities
READ BELOW: River Murray safety fears
A SEVERE thunderstorm and damaging wind warning has been issued for parts of SA as householders, farmers and business owners attempt to mop up the mess from last week’s wild conditions.
The latest warning from the Bureau of Meteorology warns of wind gusts in excess of 90 km/h in the North East Pastoral district. A warning for parts of the Flinders districts has been cancelled.
Locations which may be affected include Moomba, Innamincka, Arkaroola, Olary, the Strzelecki Track south of Moomba and Danggali Conservation Park.
Despite a sunny morning, there is a chance of a thunderstorm tonight for the metropolitan area.
The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting up to 100mm of rain over the ranges between Sunday and Tuesday, and Adelaide could be hit with up to 40mm.
PETA CREDLIN: Truth is hard to find in a blackout
This could prompt further flood warnings.
Premier Jay Weatherill has asked people to “gear up” and support each other through the next wave of wet weather.
“We are hopefully nearing the end of this extreme weather event,” he said. “However there may be some further stage before we get to the end of this.”
An extra 50,000 sandbags were flown into the Edinburgh RAAF base on Saturday and distributed by 100 Australian Defence Force personnel.
Authorities advised people to leave any existing sandbags in place in preparation for more flooding.
Mr Weatherill said more than 1300 people had visited eight relief centres across the state since Wednesday’s severe storm caused a statewide blackout. There have been more than 3000 calls to the recovery hotline.
Emergency service strike teams from Victoria and Western Australia have travelled from both sides of the country to help with the recovery effort.
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis on Saturday visited Wilmington — described by some as “ground zero” — where twin cyclones took out a series of transmission towers.
He said high winds had blown some towers over and twisted others. SA Power Networks have begun preliminary repair but Mr Koutsantonis said it would be “a long time” before repairs were complete.
A BOM spokesman warned another weather front due later on Sunday will bring “more showers and possibly storms across much of the state, particularly the agricultural districts”.
There could be up to 100mm of rain between now and Tuesday over the Mt Lofty ranges. “As such, we have another flood watch for the state’s mid-north, Mt Lofty ranges and Adelaide metropolitan districts,” he said.
The Mt Bold Reservoir is already at 92 per cent capacity and agricultural lands at Virginia have been swamped by floodwaters.
Overnight the Gawler River breached a levy to the west of Virginia, flowing into farming land.
In the Adelaide Hills, Langhorne Creek was isolated due to flooding.
The Wakefield River threatened the Port Wakefield township and surrounding areas, requiring a “Herculean effort” from locals to erect a temporary sandbag levy, Mr Weatherill said.
About 20 buildings were flooded in Bowmans.
Port Wakefield Rd was cut off in parts, hampering motorists travelling out of Adelaide for the long weekend.
Authorities issued another plea on Saturday for people to be careful on the roads. “Please don’t drive through floodwaters,” Mr Weatherill urged. “Not only are people putting their own lives at risk but they’re putting the lives of emergency services personnel at risk.”
Business anger over stock dump
By Adam Langenberg
AFTER more than 48 hours without electricity, frustrated Port Lincoln business owners are angry over the extended outage with one seafood wholesaler saying heads needed to roll.
Despite palpable relief when power was finally restored on Friday evening, many businesses were angry about a lack of communication, and disconsolate about having to send thousands of dollars of spoiled produce to the city’s dump.
Port Lincoln seafood wholesaler The Fresh Fish Place scrambled to place 26 pallets of frozen fish on a refrigerated truck to Adelaide on Friday, but managing director Craig McCathie estimated it had already relegated tens of thousands of dollars worth of seafood to the tip.
“We had several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of produce in stock but we’re hopeful the majority of what we put on the truck will still be all right when it gets back from Adelaide,” Mr McCathie said.
Mr McCathie said heads needed to roll at electricity providers or in the State Government due to “non-existent communication” during the outage, service failures and rising costs to consumers.
“We just wanted an answer at any point during the outage about when our electricity was going to be back on ... I should have gone and hired a generator but I didn’t know we were going to be out so long,” he said.
“I’m running a business with 27 staff and I don’t know if I can open my doors on Tuesday because all my stock is in Adelaide.”
The Hotel Boston head chef Jamie-Lee Ferguson turfed out what he called “easily worth thousands of dollars” of produce at the tip, while the town’s supermarkets regularly filled multiple skip bins with spoiled food during the outage.
Port Lincoln Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Chairman Richard Horgan said almost all of the city’s businesses and households were feeling the pinch.
“It’s hard to put a dollar figure on it but our community is feeling quite a bit of pain,” Mr Horgan said. He said the Eyre Peninsula had encountered long-running electricity and water issues and nothing had been done to fix them.
“I don’t know if it’s because we’re a safe Liberal seat or if it’s because we’re a city of only 15,000 people but we often get forgotten despite being a big pool for tourists and having significant aquaculture and agriculture industries,” he said.
“But we’re a resilient regional community, we just shrug our shoulders and get on with it the best we can.”
Long road ahead for flooded regional communities
By Doug Robertson, Katrina Stokes, Elizabeth Henson
COMMUNITIES rallied to save sodden properties, emergency services volunteers went without sleep and even the army chipped in.
But last night, residents in flood-ravaged areas north of Adelaide were breathing a little easier after water levels at many sodden areas began to ease.
But police have warned against complacency in an ever-changing situation and that people should avoid the hardest hit areas including Port Wakefield, Two Wells, Virginia and Gawler.
The Wakefield and Gawler rivers both broke their banks yesterday, causing widespread flooding.
The Bureau of Meteorology says the river level at Gawler township had peaked and was gradually easing, while river levels in the North Para above Nuriootpa continue to ease below the minor flood levels.
However. an SES flood emergency warning is still in place for the Gawler area.
The SES also advised that flooding in Port Wakefield was stabilising but people are still advised to avoid the area.
A series of road closures in the area threw people’s holiday plans into chaos. The usually busy Port Wakefield Rd was dead on Saturday, closed and cut off to holiday-makers, adding hours to drives to popular holiday destinations, including the Yorke Peninsula and Flinders Ranges.
People heading to the Yorke Peninsula were forced to detour on to the Northern Expressway, then through Clare and Lochiel.
A truckie, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the Sunday Mail he believed the road closures were “an over-reaction”.
Trying to get to Darwin from Adelaide, authorities told him he could not drive his double road train further than Port Wakefield.
“This is ridiculous — if this happened (the closures) in the Territory, you’d be laughed at,” he said. “In the Territory, if this was a foot deep, you’d get everyone through.”
Locals sandbagged homes and reinforced levees as rising water put properties at risk.
Premier Jay Weatherill visited Roseworthy, where he handed out donated Vili’s pies, and Two Wells to visit about 100 7th RAR, of Edinburgh, members who were assisting in the efforts.
“We hope we are in a lull but we need to be vigilant,” the Premier said. “I’ll be receiving regular updates from the Police Commissioner, from the chief of the SES about whether conditions alter, (but) if they don’t alter and proceed along the present trajectory, we should be through this soon.
“We still have the State Emergency Centre up and ready to go, it’s capable of being pushed back on to full operation with two hours notice. So we’re ready to roll.”
Victorian SES volunteer David Rowlands, 59, left his wife and two adult children in Melbourne to help out at Two Wells with about 50 other volunteers. “It was all a bit of a rush to come over but we’ve come to give a bit of a hand,’’ he said.
CFS volunteer Richard Gregory said his unit had been sandbagging the area around Port Wakefield since Saturday morning as a precaution.
“We didn’t know how high the river was going to get and we’re keeping an eye on things just in case,” he said.
Justin Rice, 44, whose parents’ Gawler River Rd home is opposite several flooded properties, said the sandbag wall he had built should keep the floodwaters back. It closed off the driveway and supported a packed earth boundary surrounding the property.
“We’ve been here for 33 years so we know what’s going to happen,’’ he said. “I reckon this (wall) will do the job and we’ve pretty much done it all ourselves.”
Meanwhile, a small number of adventure-seekers sought to take advantage of the River Torrens’ high levels. Despite warnings from authorities to stay away from floodwater, the river rats shot the rapids at Flinders Park.
A bystander who captured footage said a number of people told the young men, who were riding on makeshift rafting equipment, that they were being foolish and should get out of the river.
River Murray safety fears
By Lauren Novak
SCHOOL holiday-makers are being warned to take extra care on the River Murray as floodwaters create fast-moving flows and cover hidden dangers.
But experts have played down fears that river levels could reach the heights of the damaging 2010 floods.
A combination of South Australia’s wild and stormy weather, and flooding upstream in eastern states, is generating flows of more than 40,000 megalitres a day across the border into SA.
That is expected to rise to 50,000 or 55,000 megalitres a day later this month and could peak above 60,000 megalitres within six to seven weeks.
Jarrod Eaton, the Environment, Water and Natural Resources Department manager of water resource operation, said there were no immediate concerns about flooding affecting Riverland properties but those venturing on to the water should be careful.
“The river is flowing a lot stronger than normal,” he said.
“There will be more submerged hazards because the river levels are up.
“If you’re on the river, take the right precautions, wear life jackets. When you’re driving a boat or skiing near the river’s edge, just be careful.”
The high water levels are a welcome relief for the environment though, increasing flows out of the Murray Mouth and wetting floodplains.
“Some of the trees out there were showing signs they were under stress,” Mr Eaton said.
“This water enables us to put better quality fresh water out on to the floodplain so the trees benefit from it.
“The birds love it, too, and the frogs and the fish — it sets off breeding events.” Much of the water is flowing in from New South Wales, where the biggest floods in decades hit the state’s central west.
The community of Forbes is bracing for more flooding as parts of NSW are hit by the tail end of the storm cell that wreaked havoc across South Australia.
Swollen rivers in the flood-ravaged areas near Forbes are expected to continue rising and locals could be inundated by a second peak of the Lachlan River of 10.5m today.
An evacuation warning has been issued for nearby low-lying Condobolin.
“There’s still some reasonable rainfall forecast to occur on Monday and Tuesday across the Upper Murray catchment,” Mr Eaton said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we potentially see flows over and above 60,000 megalitres.
“I know there’s people talking about 100,000 megalitre flows per day but I just can’t see that happening.
“That (100,000 megalitres) would be bigger than the 2010-11 (flood) event, which was about 94,000 megalitres.
“That had moderate to major flooding in all of the catchments at one time and that’s not happening now.”