00:00Let's head to Queensland for the moment where extra tropical cyclone Koji is battering sections of the North Queensland coast with heavy rainfall and winds.
00:11It's made landfall as a category one system a few hours ago but the system has now been downgraded.
00:18Bryn Wakefield joins us now from Mackay where conditions are causing some power outages and flood warnings.
00:26Hi there, thanks so much for joining us Bryn. So how severe is the weather in Mackay at the moment? Are there any warnings for the community?
00:35Yes, thank you Mel. We're just on the southern edge of the severe weather system here in Mackay and that's extra tropical cyclone Koji.
00:44Yes, we're seeing some wind gusts around 60km an hour, we're seeing locally intense rainfall as well and particularly the people in Mackay at the moment are just staying indoors.
00:55We're not seeing very many people on the roads at the moment staying sort of well clear.
01:00So yeah, there certainly are warnings around there. There's warnings for flash flooding for a lot of our coastal areas and particularly today of focus is the Pioneer River,
01:10which connects Mackay to some of the rural localities like Morrani and particularly up that way we've seen rainfall totals around 150mm.
01:19And so council, local disaster management groups are sort of looking there to see the levels, will they go over?
01:27They don't expect that to happen at this stage. But yeah, there has been quite a strong local impact here.
01:33We've seen around about 6,000 homes without power across the Mackay region today and Ergon Energy, our provider, is looking into that but sort of won't be able to, I guess, fix any of those until the winds die down.
01:47And we've also had about 10 flights cancelled from Mackay Airport.
01:51So yeah, certainly starting to see some of the impacts at the moment.
01:55Yeah, Bryn, this is obviously something that Queenslanders are fairly used to, fairly prepared for, I suppose, when it comes to severe weather like this.
02:05But just how are local authorities managing the conditions there today?
02:11Yeah, well, that's exactly right. I think everyone's been keeping a close eye on the forecast.
02:15We've had our local disaster management group meet yesterday.
02:18And as mentioned, they're still meeting today.
02:20So they'll be looking to see, again, that river, if it does overflow, they don't believe it will.
02:25But analysing that, they're going to be meeting again today around 2 o'clock just to see if there's any more information to go out to locals.
02:32But currently there's no active shelters or evacuation spaces at the moment.
02:38It's not quite got to that level yet.
02:40And it's generally, you know, our SES State Emergency Services people are out in the region.
02:47They were pre-deployed here.
02:49Same with us, with water teams, with the Queensland Fire Department in case there does have to be sort of a flood rescue.
02:54So a lot of preparation goes into it.
02:56And as you mentioned, this region has seen a lot of heavy weather.
03:00It was battered by Cyclone Debbie in 2017.
03:03And that was about 61,000 homes without power and 25,000 people evacuated.
03:08So we're not quite reaching that yet.
03:11There's obviously going to be a little bit more heavy rain coming.
03:14That's predicted by the Bureau, but certainly not at that level we've seen in previous years yet.
03:20Alright, Bryn Wakefield in Mackay there for us.
03:23Thanks very much.
03:24Thanks very much.
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