Floods, mass power cuts as wild weather hits Australia

Gusts and torrential rain have blacked out more than a quarter of a million properties and swamped parts of Australia's east coast, officials said on Sunday, with one driver confirmed dead and a dozen troops injured in the wild weather.

- Agence France-Presse

SYDNEY:

After days hovering off the coast as a category 2 tropical cyclone and battering a 400-kilometre stretch of coastline, Alfred weakened into a tropical depression before making landfall on Saturday evening.

But as the remnants of the cyclone moved inland, hundreds of thousands of people remained without power on Sunday, and video images showed knee-high water pouring through roads in some of the worst-hit areas of southeast Queensland and northeast New South Wales.

A total of 23 centimetres of rain had descended on the Queensland resort of Hervey Bay in just a few hours, flooding homes and forcing emergency rescues in rapid waters, the state's premier, David Crisafulli, told a news conference.