Victorian SES chief operating officer Tim Wiebusch says the expected peak in the Murray River at Echuca has been pushed back to Tuesday, giving the city “a bit of a scare”.
Wiebusch said Rochester could also face further flooding if the oncoming rain unfortunately passes over already flooded areas for two or three days.
Wiebusch appeared alongside his NSW counterpart Ken Murphy on the ABC’s News Breakfast this morning.
Tim Wiebusch, Head of Victoria SES. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Murphy said NSW authorities were working with their Victorian counterparts to protect the Moama side of the Murray River in Echuca. He also said the northern NSW town of Moree had received more than 100 millimeters of rain overnight as a band of rain crossed the state from central Australia.
Here’s Wiebusch’s chat with host Michael Rowland after his NSW counterpart spoke first and said the receding river top was a “fix”.
Edited for length and clarity:
Rowland: What is the last message you have for the people here in Echuca?
Wiebusch: As you mentioned, a bit of a break in that area from Barmah to Echuca. There are several communities before Echuca (Barmah, Lower Moira and Echuca) that are under emergency evacuation warnings at this time. As you have just heard in New South Wales, this is our most severe warning level and we are asking people to move away from the threat of flooding. On the plus side, we expect it to reach major flooding on the Victorian side at around 94.8m on Sunday and then continue to slowly rise to that 95m AHD level sometime on Monday, into Tuesday morning.
Rowland: We have more rain overnight in Echuca and Rochester. What is the latest information you have on the impact of the rain on those already flooded towns?
Wiebusch: I guess at this point, the rain we’ve seen overnight has been fortunately very small in volume. Expect more rain with thunderstorms, both today and tomorrow we could see isolated thunderstorms of 20-30 millimeters. The key difference is that we won’t see this band of widespread rain with hundreds of millimeters of rain as we saw in the previous event. It’s a lot of localized flooding in the first instance. If we are unlucky enough to spend two or three days in the same places with these storms, it could put some of our rivers in renewed rise and that potentially includes communities downstream from Lake Eppalock like Rochester.