Emergency services were searching for a woman who was “swept away in floodwater” amid heavy rain and snow in Australia’s New South Wales (NSW), state police said on Sunday.
NSW Police said they received reports late on Saturday that a Mini Countryman had “attempted to drive through floodwater” in the Hunter Valley wine region north of Sydney “before it became stuck.”
The passenger, a woman believed to be in her 20s, “was swept away in floodwater” as she attempted to leave the vehicle. The driver, a 27-year-old woman, managed to leave the car and was uninjured.
A 40-year-old man was also swept away by floodwater after getting stuck in a tree nearby, police said. Emergency services eventually managed to pull him to shore and took him to hospital.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology on Sunday had flood warnings in place for areas of NSW including the Hunter. It also issued severe weather warnings for damaging winds.
Heavy rain has been affecting the state all week, with some areas recording more than 100 millimetres of rainfall in 24 hours to Sunday morning, according to BOM data.
“Severe weather has caused major to moderate flooding across the state,” the NSW State Emergency Service (SES) said in an operational update on Sunday. The service said that it was responding to more than 1,400 “incidents relating to rainfall, thunderstorms and snow.”
On Saturday, the SES said it dealt with more than 100 vehicles stuck in several locations along the New England Highway, running from Queensland to NSW, after “unexpected parts of the state” saw up to 50 centimetres of snow fall overnight.