CANBERRA, June 6 (Xinhua) -- A strong low pressure system moving across the eastern coastal areas of Australia has caused strong winds, heavy rains and severe flooding since the weekend, leaving at least three dead in the country.
Emergency services in Canberra reported the death of a 37-year-old man, who attempted to cross the Cotter river near Canberra on Sunday night.
Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Police's Station Sergeant Harry Hains told the media that while awaiting emergency services support, the man was washed away from his car and his body was found some time later.
"During the course of the (rescue) events a male was located in his vehicle, stuck in raging flood waters in the middle of the Cotter River," Hains told the press on Monday.
"While (the rescue team was)trying to ascertain a safe method to extract him, the vehicle has shifted and the male has disappeared from view along with his vehicle."
"A search was then undertaken and a short time later, police located what we believe to be a body stuck in raging floodwaters in an island in the middle of the river," he said.
The ACT State Emergency Service (SES), has asked residents not to take unnecessary risks in times of floods as they are unpredictable and help might not always be available.
Two more deaths were reported in New South Wales as the bodies of two people were found in cars caught in floodwaters in separate incidents on Monday in the state's southwest.
NSW Police Acting Assistant Commissioner Kyle Stewart said it was a tragedy to see deaths despite constant warnings about the dangers of entering flood waters.
"We simply do not know how either of these two men came to be in the floodwaters. But what we know is that their deaths show just how dangerous floodwaters are," he said.
Three people remained missing until Monday night as the search for them had been called off temporarily due to darkness but will resume in the first light Tuesday morning.
In Tasmania, where the low pressure system hit hard on Monday, a man in his 80s disappeared in the upper Derwent Valley, and a woman in her 70s is missing in Latrobe after her husband was rescued through the roof of their flooded home.
On Bondi Beach in Sydney's east, witnesses reported to police that a man had been washed off the beach. The search was also suspended on Monday night and will resume on Tuesday morning.
The storm whipped up waves as high as 12 meters (40 feet), which caused serious beach erosion and forced hundreds of coastal residents to evacuate.
Photos published on local media and social media have shown high tides battering the coastal line, ripping front windows off some sea-side homes. Residents in some areas noted 10 to 15 meters of land had been washed away.
The NSW State Emergency Service was inundated with more than 9,700 calls for assistance, after strong winds brought down trees and caused structural damage to properties, many of which had suffered flood damage, while in Canberra the calls for assistance are mainly about leaking roofs.
Severe storms have also been blamed for nationwide outages of online shopping websites and video streaming service, as well as the unavailability of vital services such as the use of ATMs and EFTPOS transactions.
The outages, which have reportedly affected millions of Australians, began at around 4 p.m. on Sunday evening and continued throughout the night, after many servers were affected by storms which lashed across the entire eastern seaboard -- from Brisbane to Canberra.
Australian Bureau of Meteorology said the low pressure system was losing strength as it moved off the coast, but a large swell and king tides would raise the risk of flooding, beach erosion and coastal inundation in all coastal areas south of Port Macquarie, central New South Wales.
Storm and flood are expected to continue raging in Tasmania on Tuesday while NSW and ACT have prepared to assess the full extend of the damage.
