Australia blanketed in biggest snowfall since mid-80s
- - Australia blanketed in biggest snowfall since mid-80s
Our Foreign StaffAugust 4, 2025 at 3:55 AM
A kangaroo hopping through the snow in New South Wales
Several towns in eastern Australia were blanketed with their thickest layer of snow in decades as wild weather swept the area over the weekend.
Cars, roofs and gardens were completely white as a cold air front dropped as much as 16in (40cm) of snow on parts of northern New South Wales on Saturday, the most since the mid-1980s.
Snow also settled in areas of the neighbouring state of Queensland for the first time in ten years, Miriam Bradbury, a meteorologist at Australia’s weather bureau, said.
The snow, combined with heavy rain and thunderstorms, has led to more than 1,455 incidents, according to the New South Wales State Emergency Service.
The Bolt Inn at Uralla, New South Wales, has become a refuge for people displaced by the snowstorm
Thousands of homes are expected to remain without power for another 24 hours, while mobile phone outages have been widely reported across the area.
More than 200 vehicles were stranded on roads due to snow, storms had damaged buildings, and major flood warnings were issued.
The rain started to ease on Sunday, but parts of New England in New South Wales were told to evacuate ahead of major flooding expected on Monday.
Snow blankets the grass at a golf club, in Armidale, New South Wales - Reuters
Ms Bradbury said climate change has made Australia’s weather more volatile in recent years, but that this sort of event had only occurred several times in history.
“What makes this event unusual is how much snow we had but also how widespread, covering quite a large part of the northern tablelands,” she said.
Australians in New South Wales enjoyed rare snowfall, building snowmen, having snowball fights and capturing the unusual winter scene https://t.co/ms5IhuxjmB pic.twitter.com/6leuFbcmav
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 3, 2025
Many were keen to make the most of the unexpected weather. Footage showed residents making snowmen and enjoying snowball fights, a rare sight in Australia’s most populous state.
“It’s a very surreal experience. I’ve never seen snow before in my entire life,” Brendan Gough, who travelled hundreds of miles from Queensland to experience the phenomenon, told Reuters.
Police in New South Wales, said a car had become stuck in floodwater on Saturday evening and a female passenger was swept away. The search was continuing on Sunday, they said.
The 27-year-old woman was rescued without injuries, police later said on Monday, adding that the search for other possible victims was underway.
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Source: “AOL General News”
