Authorities are planning to evacuate the entire far north Queensland Indigenous community of Wujal Wujal as the region’s flooding emergency continues to worsen.
Nine people, including a child, spent the night trapped on the roof of the local health clinic before they were able to self-evacuate on Monday morning during a temporary reprieve in water levels.
Later in the morning, authorities revealed they were planning to evacuate the entire community of Wujal Wujal by air to Cooktown. The town was one of many in Queensland’s north cut off by rising flood waters caused by ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper.
Another nine people remained stranded on rooftops in nearby Degarra and Bloomfield, with emergency services in contact but unable to reach them on Monday morning.
Kiley Hanslow, the Wujal Wujal Aboriginal shire council CEO, said most of the remote Indigenous community had been inundated, including the council building, the town’s only store, the petrol station and many homes.
“People are really scared.” she said. “We work together though … so there’s about 50 people sheltering at my place across on the other side of the community. We got stuck on this side because we’re helping people to evacuate.
“Everyone else on the other side is safe.”
Resident Dallas Walker spent an hour at the town clinic on Sunday afternoon. In that time small creeks rose with the tides to threaten the building. Her house flooded.
Walker described brown, dirty water running through the town’s streets.
The water was filled with crocodiles.
“We’re looking at a house with people stuck there. They have a traditional owner, [who is] elderly. I can’t say how many people are there. But we’ve been here all morning, trying to get help, trying to get some sort of boat just to get over and bring them back to safety,” she said.
With rain constant, the water level was expected to rise, with the high tide on Monday afternoon.
Regan Kulka, the Wujal Wujal deputy mayor, said he had to flee his home at about 9pm on Sunday after stepping outside and seeing the flood waters rising.
“It’s a pretty high house. We didn’t think we were in any danger and it came up. Luckily we got out of there,” Kulka said.
“It went underwater. The water went right through it. There’s a hole in the ceiling. All my white goods are gone. We’re told we’re being evacuated but we haven’t got an ETA.
“There’s nobody here for us, we’re here on our own, there’s no ED at the hospital, the power is off, there’s no food in the store. We’re just being forgotten.”
Earlier on Monday, photos posted to social media by the Cape York Weekly showed clinic staff and patients huddled on the roof and on top of a troop carrier, with flood waters below more than 2 metres deep. One of them was a sick seven-year-old boy.
The Queensland premier, Steven Miles, on Monday morning said attempts to rescue people trapped in Wujal Wujal had earlier been hampered by the extreme weather conditions. The cloud was too low and the rain too heavy.
“The problem is the rain won’t stop and until it eases up we can’t get aerial support into remote places like Wujal Wujal and we have people stuck on roofs that have been there all night.
“We have people standing by ready to do the rescues but we have to wait until it is safe to do so.”
The state disaster coordinator, deputy police commissioner Shane Chelepy, said authorities were expecting “considerable rainfall” in the far north again on Monday “so we will be looking at evacuating those people from Wujal Wujal up to Cooktown”.
“The other areas outside of Wujal Wujal, we know we still have seven people on five houses at Degarra on the roofs there and we have two people on the roof at Bloomfield,” Chelepy said.
“We are doing everything we can to get our emergency services in to support these people.
“We have been in contact via phone and we know they are safe and being on the roof at the moment is the safest location for these people. The water, through those areas, is moving very rapidly and for us to undertake rescues at this point in time would be highly unsafe.”
