FROM NBC NEWS

10 die as 'instant tsunami' hits Australia town
Intense deluge sparks 26-foot high wall of water; torrent heads toward Brisbane

BRISBANE, Australia — Greg Kowald was driving through the center of Toowoomba when a terrifying, tsunami-like wall of water roared through the streets of the northeast Australian city.
Office windows exploded, cars careened into trees and bobbed in the churning brown water like corks. The deluge washed away bridges and sidewalks; people desperately clung to power poles to survive. Before it was over, the flash flood left at least 10 dead and 78 missing.

"The water was literally leaping, six or 10 feet into the air, through creeks and over bridges and into parks," Kowald, a 53-year-old musician, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "There was nowhere to escape, even if there had been warnings. There was just a sea of water about a kilometer (half a mile) wide."

The violent surge in Toowoomba brought the overall death toll from weeks of flooding in Queensland state to 20, a sudden acceleration in a crisis that had been unfolding gradually with swollen rivers overflowing their banks and inundating towns while moving toward the ocean. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said there were "grave fears" for at least 18 of those missing.
The high waters headed next to Australia's third-largest city, Brisbane, where up to 9,000 homes were expected to be swamped. The Brisbane River overflowed its banks Tuesday and officials warned that dozens of low-lying neighborhoods and parts of downtown could be inundated in coming days.

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FROM ABC NEWS (AUSTRALIA)

Floods driving food and commodity prices

TONY EASTLEY: The economic impact of the Queensland floods is being felt far beyond Australia.

The crisis is driving up prices of global commodities such as wheat, coal and sugar.

Rachel Carbonell reports.

RACHEL CARBONELL: Australia is one of the world's biggest exporters of wheat and coal, much of which comes from Queensland.

Managing partner at Top Third Ag Marketing in Chicago Mark Gold says the effect on Queensland's wheat crop is contributing to worldwide shortages and driving up prices every day.

MARK GOLD: We've gone from $ US7.05 a bushel to $ US8.63 a bushel of Kansas City wheat. So that's almost a 20 per cent, a little bit more than 20 per cent increase so it's been a direct correlation.

And really since, the big jump has come from really December first and today and we were up another 10 cents today. We went up more at one point but sold off a little bit.

You know the shortages around the world - you know it just seems like every year for the last three years now we've had one problem after another with one of the major wheat crops.

RACHEL CARBONELL: He says the price of sugar is also going up.

MARK GOLD: Your sugar cane crop has certainly been affected by the flooding there. We've seen sugar prices at very strong price. Not like we saw back at 1972 and 73 but we're at the highest prices we've been at roughly 20, 30 years out here.

So all of this is having an impact.

RACHEL CARBONELL: The availability of coal, particularly coal used in steel production around the world, is also being affected.

The Queensland Premier Anna Bligh told the 7.30 Report three-quarters of the state's coal fields are unable to operate and supply markets.

ANNA BLIGH: There is likely to be a significant long term effect of that, not only nationally but internationally.

Queensland supplies half of the world's coking coal needed in steel manufacture so there is a remarkable problem out there in the mining industry.

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