Five people missing after storms lash south-east Queensland
South-east Queensland was hit by another wave of storms, with two women missing in Gympie. Photo: AAP
Five people are reportedly missing after severe storms battered south-east Queensland, capsizing a boat in Moreton Bay.
A nine-year-old girl is missing inside flooded drains in south Brisbane, while police divers are searching for two people after a boat capsized between Manly and Green Island on Tuesday, ABC News reported.
Queensland Ambulance said eight people were taken to hospital after the boat incident.
Two women are missing in south-east Queensland amid fears they were swept away in flood waters in Gympie.
Emergency workers were called to the Kidd Bridge on Tuesday afternoon after reports three women were swept away.
Police said one woman, 46, made it to safety and alerted authorities but two others, 46 and 40, are still missing in the vicinity of the Mary River.
Police, swift water rescue crews and State Emergency Service volunteers are searching the area, police said on Tuesday night.
Earlier, Gympie was hit by a severe thunderstorm that uprooted trees as a band of storms rolled through the state’s south-east.
The severe weather follows storms on Christmas Day that left thousands of people without power.
One woman was killed by a falling tree on Monday evening.
The 59-year-old sustained severe head injuries after her car was hit by a tree at Helensvale on the Gold Coast.
Queensland Ambulance Service assistant commissioner Andrew Hebbron warned people to avoid travelling on the roads during severe weather.
“An absolutely tragic set of circumstances and a good reminder for the moment and especially today that if you don’t need to be on the roads today we encourage you not to be,” he said.
In Jimboomba, south of Brisbane, Betty and David Hall’s ceiling collapsed.
“It was scary, I was panicking,” Ms Hall said.
“We lost power as well.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 120,000 people were still without electricity across the state’s south-east.
Of those, 82,000 were on the Gold Coast, where 700 power lines were down.
“There’ll be a couple of days of work there to rectify that,” Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate said.
“We’ve got powerlines down, even at our theme parks, so we’re prioritising that as well.”
Premier Steven Miles said the damage from the storm was currently being assessed.
“This is the first time we’ve seen a storm so intense in the south-east that it’s taken down concrete power poles,” he said.
Queensland Ambulance Service said paramedics’ workloads “surged significantly” as storms hit the Gold Coast on Monday night.
“We saw everything from people being injured in their homes from damage that was incurred by the storms to some less serious electrocutions,” Mr Hebbron said.
A man in his 70s was hurt when a tree branch that fell onto a tent in Helensvale. He was in a stable condition in hospital with pelvic and back injuries.
A collapsed roof put a man in his 90s in hospital with a head injury, where he remained in a stable condition.
Fallen power lines, felled trees smashing cars and homes and several drivers crashing into poles kept ambulance crews busy on Christmas Day.
It took paramedics an hour to wrench one person from a car that was hit by a large tree in the Hinterland district.
Dreamworld and other Gold Coast theme parks were closed on Boxing Day due to the storms.
The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting storms will begin to subside by Wednesday afternoon in the state.
