Flood victims stranded after rent prices explode in accommodation crisis
There’s a growing accommodation crisis in Townsville with thousands of flood-affected residents trying to secure a temporary home.
But many families who are struggling to come to terms with the fact that they are now homeless have been dealt a second blow, as prices for scarce rental properties explode.
The Colletts family lost everything in the once-in-a-century floods and have been applying for rental properties ever since.
The devastated Queenslanders say the situation locally has become so dire that they are now preparing for plan B – packing up and moving to Brisbane or the Sunshine Coast.
They’re not alone either, thousands of people are homeless.
Just a couple of weeks before the floods, some rental properties had remained vacant for months.
Now real estate agents say they’re receiving 20 applications and some properties have almost doubled in price.
“There’s a house advertised for $400 and there’s people coming in and saying, ‘look we’ll put down $600 because we just want to get it’,” Harcourts’ Ben Kingsberry said.
Antonia Mercorella from the Real Estate Institute Queensland urged those with extra accommodation to consider the needs of the community during these trying times.
“If you do have a single room in your house it might be an opportunity to offer that to either a tradie or a local person,” Ms Mercorella said.
Death, disease and a 60-km wide ‘mega river’
The flooding has caused death, disease and heartbreak, and now the vast inland sea has triggered a violent thunderstorm.
The unusual storm, which normally only happens over the ocean, was triggered by moist warm air generated by the swollen Flinders River.
The river is usually a series of winding channels but has swollen into a vast inland sea more than 60 kilometres wide.
“The increase in temperature from all the flood waters, because they’re so vast, basically the size of New Caledonia at their peak, provides enough moisture to allow thunderstorms,” the Bureau of Meteorology’s Harry Clark said.
Meanwhile, the authorities are warning people to take care after one woman died and nine more people were infected by a soil-borne bacteria stirred up by heavily contaminated floodwaters.
Cases of melioidosis bacteria aren’t unusual during the wet season, however, the recent cluster of infections in Townsville following the unprecedented flooding of thousands of homes has caused concern.
Townsville Hospital says eight of the infected people remain in hospitals in a stable condition and another is being cared for at home.
The death in Townsville takes the flood toll to three, following the deaths of two men about two weeks ago.
Police are still searching for a 35-year-old man who disappeared in floodwaters at Groper Creek, south of the city, on Friday.
Further inland, authorities are racing to dispose of hundreds of thousands of dead animals in the state’s west to limit the spread of disease.
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