Australia: Thousands told to evacuate before ‘life-threatening’ Sydney flood - PHOTOS & VIDEOS

Canberra: Thousands of people in Australia's biggest city Sydney have been ordered to evacuate their homes as torrential rain battered the country’s largest city and floodwaters inundated its outskirts, Khaleej Times reported on Sunday.

Australia has been at the sharp end of climate change, with droughts, deadly bushfires, bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef and floods becoming more common and intense as global weather patterns change.

With more wild weather expected in the coming days, authorities described the floods as a “rapidly evolving situation” and warned that people should be “prepared to evacuate at short notice”.

The city’s Warragamba Dam began to spill in the early hours of Sunday morning, well ahead of authorities’ predictions.

While in Camden, a southwestern suburb of Sydney home to more than 100,000 people, local shops and a petrol station were inundated by floodwaters.

Cooke asked those living along a 500-kilometre (310-mile) stretch of Australia’s east coast, both north and south of Sydney, to consider cancelling their school holiday travel plans because of the weather.

Emergency services conducted 29 flood rescues and were called out more than 1,400 times in the previous 24 hours, she said. (UNI)