South-eastern Australia awash with floods

Feb 4, 2012, 5:52 GMT

Sydney - Monsoon floods could keep pancake-flat parts of south-eastern Australia awash for weeks, officials warned Saturday.

But the rain held off for a second day, easing fears that coast would experience a repeat of last year's catastrophe when dozens were killed, thousands of homes inundated, mines waterlogged and farmland wrecked.

More than 17,000 people had been evacuated as rivers reached close to historic levels and threaten to overflow their banks.

About 1,000 were housed in schools and other makeshift shelters by officials who warned that even military aircraft resupplying isolated towns and hamlets would not able to help everyone in their homes.

Heavy rain Queensland sent floods cascading toward the southern coast. But Australia's vastness means it might be weeks before floodwaters reach the ocean.

At Charleville, a town of 3,250 people 750 kilometres west of Brisbane, the mud-brown water came within centimetres of the top of the levee before subsiding.

'The levee is holding and on all current forecasts it's likely to keep doing that, but there's not very much room for error,' Queensland Premier Ann Bligh said.

It is cow-town Charleville's third drenching in as many years.

'I've spoken to people who are very close to tears and they certainly don't want to see those floodwaters come over the levee,' she added.

At Roma, between Charleville and the state capital, helicopters were searching for a mother whose son was saved when their car was washed away. Rescuers had reached the child but watched helplessly as the swollen river carried the woman away.

Perhaps the most critical situation was in Moree, a cotton-growing town 640 kilometres north-west of Sydney.

More than 10,000 people in and around Moree were isolated by what New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell called an 'inland sea' that had turned the town into what he characterized as a southern hemisphere Venice.

'It's an extraordinary landscape,' he said.

The Bureau of Meteorology cancelled a severe flooding warning for inland New South Wales.