Australia counts cost of floods but forecast warns more to come

Australia began to count up the cost of the floods that have left fertile farmland like swamp and inundated the country's third largest city, Brisbane.

Mining companies have announced that they will not be able to meet contracts for coal, Australia's biggest export, due to the flooding in Queensland state while farmers there are counting crop losses that could push up world food prices.

The floodwaters that swamped large tracts of Brisbane, the state capital, receded yesterday, leaving a thick layer of sludge that covered streets and thousands of houses.

More than 30,000 homes and businesses were flooded with muddy water and officials warned some residents their homes were so badly damaged they would face demolition.

The flooding is a particularly cruel blow to farmers, many of whom had hoped for bumper crops after much of Australia emerged from its worst drought in more than a century. The effects are being felt as far away as China, where prices for the coal used in steelmaking are rising, hampering government efforts to cap inflation.

Last night, Prince Charles followed the Queen's lead by making a donation to the flood relief efforts. He said the floods in Australia were "almost impossible to imagine" and paid tribute to the work of the emergency services and the armed forces in Brisbane.

He made his private donation to the Queensland premier Anna Bligh's Flood Relief Appeal.

Weeks of rain and floods across Australia's northeast have left 26 people dead. Another 53 people are still missing. Most of those unaccounted for are from the Lockyer Valley and the nearby city of Toowoomba, where a sudden downpour on Monday caused a flash flood likened to an inland tsunami.

John Bishop, a farmer on Tent Hill said any more heavy rain on the sodden soil would be catastrophic for the valley where his family has farmed since 1939. "We're hardy stock in this valley," he said.

"It'll take time, but we'll recover."

Even more frightening for farmers is the Bureau of Meteorology's prediction that rain could continue until the end of March due to the cool conditions in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean associated with the current La Nina - a weather system known for producing heavy rains.Flooding rains yesterday spread farther south along the Australian east coast, forcing thousands of people to be evacuated from their homes in Victoria state and the island state of Tasmania.

Some towns were all but abandoned as major flood alerts were issued for five rivers in Victoria and residents were evacuated from three towns in northwest Tasmania where an entire summer's average rainfall was recorded in a single day, authorities said.

The overall cost to Australia's A$1.3 trillion (8.1bn) economy from the Queensland floods could amount to as much as A$13bn, or 1 per cent of gross domestic product, if infrastructure damage is confirmed as severe, JP Morgan economist Stephen Walters warned in a special research report.