Military aircraft flew supplies to an Australian town slowly disappearing beneath floodwaters on Monday, as record flooding in the country’s north-east continues to cut coal exports and devastate wheat production.
Flooding covering an area greater than France and Germany combined has caused more than Aus$1-billion ($980-million) in damage, forced thousands from their homes and hit the commodity exports that are a mainstay of the Australian economy.
“This is a major natural disaster and recovery will take a significant amount of time,” said Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
“The extent of flooding being experienced by Queensland is unprecedented and requires a national and united response,” said Gillard in announcing financial aid for flood victims.
Flooded open-pit coal mines and washed out rail lines in Queensland state have seen global miners including Anglo American and Rio Tinto declare force majeure and reduce coal exports to a trickle.
The major Queensland coal port of Dalrymple has resumed operations, but there were nearly 50 ships offshore waiting to be loaded, while the port of Gladstone was operating at a greatly reduced capacity.
“We have just under one million tonnes of coal stockpiled. We have a capacity of six million tonnes in our stockpile. We are running a very low stockpile,” Gladstone Ports Corporation spokesperson Lee McIvor told Reuters.
Queensland’s ports have an annual coal export capacity of 225-million tonnes.
“There are probably about 18 ships waiting, and there probably will likely be more, because the demand for coal around the world is quite high,” said McIvor, adding it may take 10 days for a washed-out major rail link to the port to reopen.
Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coking coal used for steel-making and accounts for about two-thirds of global trade. It is also the second-biggest exporter of thermal coal used for power generation.
Wheat transport halted
Australia is the world’s fourth largest wheat exporter and the floods have caused as much as half the nation’s wheat crop, or about 10-million tonnes, to be downgraded to less than milling quality because of rain damage.
The floods have halted the transportation of all grains in Queensland, GrainCorp, the country’s largest grain handler said on Monday.
“We are unable to move anything by rail or, of course, road,” said David Ginns, corporate affairs manager at GrainCorp, adding that transport of grain to port elevators from inland areas had effectively ceased, and the domestic distribution network had also been impacted.
Wheat harvesting starts as early as September in central Queensland and as late as December on the state’s eastern farmlands, but the heavy rain and floods have delayed harvesting in some areas as machinery cannot be used in the soggy paddocks.
Ginns said the wheat crop in the state of New South Wales (NSW), hit by separate flooding in recent weeks, should not be affected by the Queensland floods.
US wheat futures rose more than 1% in early Asian trade on Monday, buoyed by supply concerns.
Evacuations ordered
The worst flooding in Australia in about 50 years, which has cut off 22 towns and stranded about 200 000 people, has been caused by a La Niña weather pattern which produces monsoonal rains over the western Pacific and South-east Asia.
Queensland’s interior, normally a vast outback of cattle properties, farms and mines, is now an inland sea, dotted with the roofs of flooded homes, islands crowded with stranded livestock and boats ferrying people and emergency supplies.
One person has been killed in what Queensland state Treasurer Andrew Fraser called a “disaster of biblical proportions”.
Rivers in the state’s south have hit levels higher than any on record, and are predicted to go as high as 13m.
In Rockhampton, a community of 77 000 situated 600km north of the state capital Brisbane, floodwaters reached nine metres early on Monday, said the state’s emergency coordinator, police deputy commissioner Ian Stewart.
“Today we’ll see resupply of Rockhampton by military aircraft taking supplies into Mackay and then road transporting them down to Rockhampton. That will continue until such time as the road is cut,” Stewart told a news conference.
Rockhampton resident Reg Wilson said he does not want to leave his home, but police told him he had no choice.
“A policeman came along in a car with a gun on his hip who said ‘You be out of here by five o’clock or else’,” he said. “When a man with a gun talks to you like that, you get out.”
Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said the floodwater crisis could last weeks, even if rains eased.
“Given the scale and size of this disaster and the prospect that we’ll see waters sitting for potentially a couple of weeks…we will continue to have major issues to deal with throughout January,” Bligh told reporters. – Reuters