Queensland’s southeast coast will bear the brunt of the thunderstorms while eastern Tasmania has been hit with severe flooding after damaging storms plowed across the state’s east, north, and south, leaving businesses and homes mopping up from the heavy flooding.
If that’s not enough to contend with, Australia’s west coast is bracing for Cyclone Stan, which has begun to form off the northwest coast, having possible wind gusts of more than 150km/h. The storms and rain are expected to last several more days in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s manager of extreme weather Philip King told news.com.au the severe thunderstorm activity across the eastern coast was due to an “upper-level disturbance” over southeastern Australia. The severe weather is expected to last through the weekend.
“So combined with warm northeast winds and humid conditions across Queensland, NSW, eastern Victoria and down into Tasmania, right across the eastern states we’re seeing another day — or probably two days — of widespread thunderstorm activity, with severe thunderstorms likely,” he said.
Follow up on Tasmanian bushfires and flooding
The Tasmanian bushfires in the north and eastern parts of the state have kept emergency service crews busy for the past 10 days, and now their workload has doubled as they are responding to emergency calls due to the deluge of rain.
It has been pouring rain so hard the past 24 hours that the Tasmanian Highway was closed at three points along the east coast. The storms have also left over 3,000 people without power. Emergency crews have responded to over 120 emergency calls, and the north and northwest are bracing for more storms on Friday, and the south on Saturday.
Tasmania Fire Service senior station officer John Holloway had some disheartening news. The massive storms haven’t stretched far enough to reach the bushfires burning in the northwestern part of the state, adding that the rains have been a big problem.
“We haven’t been able to use any aircraft today because the cloud’s too low so we haven’t been able to do any water-bombing or drop crews into remote areas,” he told AAP. “It also means backburning operations are difficult and trucks can’t go up a lot of the slippery and muddy tracks,” He added.
