Australia's record floods are causing catastrophic damage to Queensland's infrastructure and have forced 75% of its coal mines to grind to a halt, the state's premier has said.
The worst flooding in decades has affected an area the size of Germany and France.
Floods have left towns virtual islands in a muddy inland sea, devastated crops, cut major rail and road links to coal ports, slashed exports and forced up world coal prices.
'Seventy-five per cent of our mines are currently not operating because of this flood, so that's a massive impact on the international markets and the international manufacture of steel,' Premier Anna Bligh told local television.
'Queensland is a very big state. It relies on the lifelines of its transport system, and those transport systems in some cases are facing catastrophic damage,' she said.
The Australian floods, which have cut off 22 towns, have been caused by a ‘La Nina’ weather pattern, which produces monsoonal rains over the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.
The La Nina saw Australia record its third wettest year on record in 2010 and is expected to last another three months, the country’s weather bureau said today.
The flood disaster, say analysts, is forecast to shave around 0.4 percentage points off GDP, which equates to just over Aus$5bn of Australia's annual output of Aus$1.3 trillion.
Sandbag levees
Residents in flooded towns worked desperately to build sandbag levees in the hope of holding back the rising waters.
In the cattle town of Rockhampton, a rise of just 20cm in floodwaters would inundate another 400 homes and lap at the front door of a further 4,000 properties.
Some 200,000 people have been affected by the floods and three have drowned.
Authorities are warning people to stay out of floodwaters.
Apart from the risk of drowning, snakes and crocodiles are being washed into homes and shops.
Australia accounts for more than half of global coking coal exports, which are vital to steelmakers, especially in Asian countries such as booming China.
The floods have hit mines which produced 35% of Australia's estimated 259 million tonnes of coal exports in 2009. An estimated $1bn has been lost in coal production, said the Queensland Resource Council.
While floodwaters are receding in the Bowen Basin coal region, flooding continued further downstream.
Flood warnings have been declared for seven river systems, with one swollen river now 6km (4 miles) wide.
