Last Year’s Bushfires and This Year’s Floods
Residents who lived through last year’s bushfires are now being forced to contend with the heavy rain. The extreme weather whiplash is raising the risk of heavy floods and debris flows in burn scars, similar to what we saw in California earlier this year.
In addition, people who fled flames are now fleeing a new menace. In some cases, homes and land that sustained damage from the fires have now been destroyed by the floods.
“We worked our butts off saving the place during the 2019 bushfires and we’ve been through the drought and now this, it’s just a bit of a kick in the guts,” Rob Costigan, a homeowner who saved his house from fire only for the floods to wash it away, told Yahoo News Australia.
Costigan said his father-in-law’s home was swept away in the floodwaters and ended up wrapped around a telephone pole.
