The east coast of Australia could be hit by a second round of damaging storms this weekend with a low pressure system forecast to dump heavy rainfall on southern Queensland and northern New South Wales.
The Bureau of Meteorology said on Wednesday that it was too early to tell whether the system would bring storms to rival those that caused significant damage, widespread flooding and killed up to seven people in Sydney, the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania last week.
“There is still uncertainty about the timing and extent of the impacts, but we have increasing confidence in a widespread rainfall event developing over southern and eastern Queensland, and inland northern New South Wales,” Andrew Tupper, director of the bureau’s national operations centre, said on Wednesday.
Tupper said areas from Queensland to Tasmania could be affected by very heavy rainfall, damaging winds and dangerous surf, depending on how the system develops.
He said it was “not unusual to have east-coast lows develop in fairly quick succession”, but it does make things more difficult for emergency services, who in NSW have just handed off the clean-up operation to recovery agencies.
“We are pretty much done and dusted with that … we would just be asking our people to get some rest and prepare for some weather this weekend,” NSW State Emergency Service (SES) spokeswoman Becky Gollings told Guardian Australia.
“We are still waiting on a clearer picture from the BoM as to exactly what is going to pan out on the weekend, it’s still unclear at this stage, but obviously we’re expecting some wet and windy weather.”
If the forecast rain did result in more flooding, Gollings urged people not to drive through high waters. Instead, she said, anyone stuck in their car in floodwaters should call triple zero and wait.
Three of the four people confirmed dead in last week’s floods were found in their cars – two in New South Wales, and one in the ACT. The fourth, a 75-year-old Tasmanian woman, died when her home was inundated.
Two more men have been missing in Tasmania since 6 June, and are presumed dead. One of the men had driven his car through a flooded road while delivering catalogues with his wife. She was found clinging to a tree and rescued by helicopter the following morning.
Police are yet to confirm whether the body of a man found at Whale Beach in Sydney’s northern beaches on Sunday was that of American student Endicott Ackerman who was swept off rocks at Bondi during the storm.
Gollings said SES volunteers in NSW rescued more than 300 people from floodwaters last week, many of whom were trapped in cars.
“Fast-flowing water, even 30cm deep, can wash cars and trucks away,” she said. “Don’t get yourself into that situation.”
Authorities in Tasmania are still dealing with the aftermath of the floods, which have devastated farmland and swept away more than 1,000 cattle.
The Environmental Protection Agency of Tasmania has begun clearing up the dead livestock, but warned that they might not all be found.
“There’s quite a few ended up in Bass Strait and may end up washing up along the coastline,” director Wes Ford told the ABC. “It might be roughly a third of those animals would be found on land, maybe a third of them have disappeared out to Bass Strait, maybe a third of them will never appear again.”
The Tasmanian and New South Wales governments have provided emergency funding to affected households.
As of last week the damage bill was $74.3m, but a spokesman for the Insurance Council of Australia said that was expected to rise.
