Outback storm floods Australia, bushfires burn

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia is living up to its iconic image as a sun burnt country of droughts and flooding rains, with a huge outback storm causing flooding in three states on Saturday as drought-fuelled bushfires continued burning.

Monsoon rains over the country's vast interior have caused the usually dry Todd River in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory to come to life and flooded outback South Australia state and parts of Victoria and New South Wales states.

The small rural town of Oodnadatta in South Australia was flooded and most major roads leading to it closed to traffic by rising waters, emergency service officials said.

Sister Joan Wilson at the Oodnadatta Hospital said medical supplies were running low.

"If we don't get the supplies through in the next couple of days, some people may be in a bit of pain," she told reporters.

The flooding prevented the Royal Flying Doctor service, the outback's medical lifeline, from reaching the town.

Many remote cattle properties in South Australia were also cut off, but farmers battling the worst drought in 100 years welcomed the rains.

"I am sure there will be a lot of pastoralists around here rubbing their hands together with glee," said Trevor McLeod, a local government officer in the opal mining center of Coober Pedy, another flooded South Australian town.

Cattle property owner Dean Rasheed said the rain was the heaviest to hit South Australia's Flinders Ranges in living memory and would bring his dry land back to life.

"I'm looking at the largest flood I've seen in my lifetime and I'm getting on in years, so it's very significant," Rasheed told Australian Associated Press news agency.

"The water is 200 meters wide and four meters deep."

As the outback storm moved east across Australia it caused flooding in Victoria, which has been battling bushfires for more than 50 days, and also the state of New South Wales.

Fires have struck five of Australia's six states since November, blackening more than 1.2 million hectares (4,600 square miles) of bushland, killing one and gutting dozens of homes.

MEGAFIRES

Some have been "megafires," created in part by global warming and a drought which has provided an abundance of fuel, stretching thousands of kilometers.

Rain in Victoria's north and east on Saturday eased bushfire threats, but failed to douse the large fires, and left the Victorian towns of Mildura and Stawell flooded, with rising waters inundating shops and stranding motorists.

Weather forecaster Ward Rooney said he could not remember when Victoria last reported such contrasting extreme weather conditions. "It's a large bundle of warnings altogether, a combination you wouldn't see too often," said Rooney.

Across the border in New South Wales, favorable weather conditions on Saturday saved the alpine resort of Thredbo from a nearby bushfire, with lower temperatures and rain from the outback storm expected on Sunday.

But in the far west of New South Wales, rain caused flooding in the mining town of Broken Hill, forcing residents to sandbag homes to stop water entering. Roads around the town were cut.

Australia's weather bureau said this month that the country appeared to be suffering from an accelerated climate change brought about by global warming.

While the heavily populated southeast experiences its worst drought for a generation, the tropics and remote northwest are receiving unseasonably heavy rains accounting for more than Australia's yearly total average.

Bird flu claims 62nd human life in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Bird flu has killed a woman in Indonesia, the 62nd death from the virus in the country with the highest human fatality rate, a health ministry official said on Saturday.

The 19-year-old woman from West Java died on Friday, Dr. Muhammad Nadirin at the ministry's bird flu centre, told Reuters.

"She was sick since Jan. 11, got a high temperature and cough and then entered Garut hospital on Jan. 17," he said.

"Six days before she got sick she had contact with a sick chicken that, according to the agriculture department's rapid test, was also positive for bird flu."

Most human bird flu cases have resulted from contact with infected fowl.

Indonesia, the world's fourth-most-populous country and one that stretches across 17,000 islands in an archipelago as wide as the continental United States, faces an uphill task in fighting the virus.

Millions of backyard fowl live in close proximity to humans and health education campaigns have often been patchy and rules difficult to enforce.

This week a campaign began to rid the Indonesian capital of such fowl but it got a mixed reaction from residents. Some welcomed the culling amid health concerns but others worried about losing a key source of income.

Bird flu remains essentially an animal disease, but it has infected nearly 260 people worldwide since late 2003, killing more than 150, according to the World Health Organisation, and sparking fears of a pandemic.

Since 2003, outbreaks have been confirmed in about 50 countries and territories.