Rental support announced for homeless NSW flood victims

Mr Perrottet said there are more than 1200 people currently in temporary emergency accommodation in the region.

There have been 9200 assessments of houses, and of those, 5500 are damaged with 2834 not habitable.

Mr Perrottet announced an additional funding package for people unable to live in their homes.

The government will provide 16 weeks of rental support in the form of $6000 for single person households and more than $18,000 for families.

He said the government will bring in motorhomes and look into longer-term housing solutions.

It comes as some Western Sydney residents have today been forced to flee their homes in the face of rising floodwaters.

Many are facing a long wait to begin the clean-up as flash-flooding is yet to ease.

Floodwaters peaked yesterday with the Hawkesbury River reaching 13.8 metres, higher than the level of the 2021 disaster.

Before 6am today it had subsided to 13.2 metres, leaving hundreds of residents still stranded away from their homes.

NSW SES Assistant Commissioner Nicole Hogan said the main areas of concern included the Hawkesbury-Nepean area and the Lower Hunter, with crews focusing on a number of hard-hit communities, including Singleton and Windsor.

The suburbs are set to be hampered with major flash-flooding for the next 24 to 48 hours.

“We are not expecting those floodwaters to recede any time soon in some of those communities, and at this stage, we have a number of evacuation orders out,” she told Today.

“We’re urging people who are under evacuation orders to really just stay away from those floodwaters because, even though it appears the rain has eased, those floodwaters most certainly not have yet and they have not yet begun to recede.”

In the past 24 hours, NSW SES received 1000 requests for assistance.

Despite a hopeful forecast of sunny skies today, it’s expected residents in the Hawkesbury and Nepean regions will not be able to get back home before the weekend.

Weatherzone meteorologist Ben Domensino said flash-flooding in New South Wales and Queensland was the result of a “prolonged rain event” caused by a few different weather systems.

“There were two upper-level lows moving over eastern Australia and they were drawing in huge amounts of moist infrastructure from the Tasman and Coral seas and it was held by a high-pressure system over New Zealand,” he told Today.

“This is a very unique weather pattern that lasted for two weeks and kept dumping rain over the eastern seaboard.”

The highest rainfall total over the past two weeks reached in excess of 2.5 metres over South-East Queensland, Mr Domensino said.

More than a metre of rain saturated northern NSW, with 775mm falling in just one day – the highest daily rainfall total anywhere in the state on record.

The weather system then moved further south and hammered Sydney.

Sydney broke records with 617mm recorded over 16 days, as well as Brisbane with 677mm of rainfall over just three days.

The 50-year-old man’s truck was found submerged in floodwaters at Greendale in Sydney’s west.

His body was discovered at about 9pm on Tuesday.

Counting the cost

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been slammed for the federal government’s flood relief response, with residents in northern NSW saying some regions had been left out.

But residents of flood-hit areas such as Mullumbimby, the Tweed Shire, and Murwillumbah said they’ve been left out in the cold.

Richmond MP Justine Elliot said the response had been insulting to the region.

“We’ve got people here now who have no homes, they have no food, they have no money. We desperately need assistance right here,” Ms Elliot said.

“We need Scott Morrison and the NSW Premier to start acting and help our region.”

In Queensland, anger towards insurance companies is mounting with flood-affected residents accusing assessors of long delays in inspecting damaged homes.

More than 70,000 claims worth a billion dollars altogether have been lodged so far.

The state government has flagged the possibility of subsidies for people looking to flood-proof their homes.