May 23 (UPI) -- Five people were confirmed killed on Friday in record flooding in northern New South Wales with 50,000 people cut off, thousands of homes and businesses without power and cattle herds wiped out.
Police confirmed the fifth fatality Friday evening after they recovered a body, believed to be a man in his 80s, from a property in the north of the state that had been cut off by flooding and landslides.
Three motorists, two men and a woman, drowned in their vehicles after being caught in floodwaters. A fourth man was found dead on the porch of his home northwest of the town of Taree.
Authorities issued fresh heavy rain warnings as the weather system headed south, bearing down on Sydney and Newcastle with at least 164 State Emergency Service warnings in place along the NSW coast.
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