ordered to leave their homes on Friday (8 April), and for some of them, it was the second evacuation order in a month. Police said that man was found dead in the city’s southwest after his car was swept away by floodwaters. Meanwhile, television footage showed roads submerged and homes and businesses inundated. “Whilst the rainfall has started to ease in most places, we do expect to see those river levels continue to rise for some time before they start to ease back over the next 12 to 24 hours,” Acting Commissioner of New South Wales emergency services, Daniel Austin, said during a media briefing.
It was just a month ago that devastating floods claimed the lives of 22 people in NSW, while tens of thousands of homes and businesses were ravaged by the extreme weather conditions. And many residents who were asked to evacuate at the time were ordered to move out again this week. “It is heart breaking, just heart breaking,” a resident in a flood-hit Sydney suburb told ABC television. “I feel sorry for the local businesses… they have been working hard cleaning up and then it came up again out of nowhere.” Having registered its wettest March on record this year, Sydney received around 170 mm (6.7 inches) of rain on Thursday, with a rainfall of up to 50 mm (2 inches) forecast by the Bureau of Meteorology on Friday.
