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Woman missing in Gold Coast floods found alive

Yang Chen was found alive on Monday after being missing since Wednesday.

Yang Chen was found alive on Monday after being missing since Wednesday. Photo: Queensland Police

A woman who vanished last week amid flooding while walking in the Gold Coast hinterland has been found alive.

Police say Yang Chen was found on Monday morning. She is suffering from exposure, and was taken to Robina Hospital.

The 26-year-old university student was reported missing on Wednesday morning by a man she had been walking with near Gorge Falls in the Tallebudgera Valley.

He told police he lost sight of her.

It is unclear whether she got lost, fell or walked out of bushland to nearby roads.

A search party of up to 30 people had been looking for Ms Chen, with paramedics saying she looked like she’d been through “quite a trauma”.

She had lost her shoes, but was able to walk to an ambulance on Monday after being given a pair of socks by a police officer.

Several creeks in the area were flooded when Ms Chen vanished. Efforts to find her were also hampered by ongoing rain – with the area drenched by more than 141 millimetres of rain in 24 hours at one point.

Flooding at Nambour Plaza in Nambour, Queensland, during last week’s storms.

The floods did claim one life – that of a 75-year-old man who had been kayaking on the swollen Mary River in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. He was found dead on Thursday.

There were also numerous rescues during the days of rain that swept across south-east Queensland last week. Among them was a Gold Coast mother who rescued her primary-school aged son when he was swept from a footpath into a rising river on Wednesday afternoon.

-with AAP

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