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Queensland's Coast Threatened by Cyclones This Week After Flood Disaster
Australia’s Queensland state, recovering from its worst floods on record, faces a second, larger storm days after Tropical Cyclone Anthony hit the coast.
Tropical Cyclone Yasi may become one of the biggest the state has experienced, Premier Anna Bligh told reporters today. The cyclone is likely to reach the Queensland coast late Feb. 2 or early Feb. 3, bringing rain and floods to the state, she said.
“This is a very serious threat” that’s expected to cross the coast near Townsville, 340 kilometers (210 miles) south of Cairns, she said. “All of the models are consistent -- we’re facing a very large system and a system that is intensifying.”
Flooding in Australia’s northeastern state since November has killed as many as 32 people, damaging homes and crops, shutting coal mines and cutting rail links. The floods will slow state economic growth and the reconstruction effort will cost at least A$5 billion ($4.94 billion), Bligh said on Jan. 28.
Cyclone Anthony crossed the coast south of Townsville before 10 p.m. local time yesterday and was downgraded to a tropical low, the Bureau of Meteorology said on its website. Cyclone Yasi is heading west from Vanuatu and is expected to develop damaging winds around island and coastal communities between Cooktown and Yeppoon on Feb. 2, the weather bureau said.
Queensland contributes about 19 percent of Australia’s economic output, producing about 80 percent of the country’s coking coal, and is responsible for 10 percent of its exports, Treasurer Wayne Swan said earlier this month. The state is also the world’s biggest exporter of coal used to produce steel.
Force Majeure
The earlier flooding caused mining companies including BHP Billiton Ltd. and Rio Tinto Group to declare force majeure, a legal clause that allows producers to miss deliveries.
The floods, which also hit Victoria and New South Wales, will add 0.25 percentage point to inflation this quarter, Swan said Jan. 28. Lost coal production so far may total A$9.5 billion, the Queensland Resources Council said Jan. 27, and steelmakers may be forced to pay as much as 78 percent more for hard coking coal during the second quarter, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Jan. 27 announced a A$1.8 billion levy on middle- and high-income earners, as well as A$2.8 billion in budget cuts and A$1 billion in delayed infrastructure projects for flood rebuilding.
Swan, visiting a flood recovery center in Queensland on Jan. 29, defended the levy as “very, very modest” with six out of 10 Australians paying “less than $1 per week.”
Opposition leader Tony Abbott has attacked the plan as a “lazy policy” that, if passed in Parliament, will highlight the “spending addiction” of Gillard’s Labor Party as her government seeks to return Australia to a budget surplus in 2012-13.
To contact the reporters on this story: Elisabeth Behrmann in Sydney at ebehrmann1@bloomberg.net; James Paton in Sydney at jpaton4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net
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