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The torrential rain currently battering Australia’s eastern coastline is verging on sign-language-levels of disaster, it has been confirmed.
Evacuations are currently taking place in towns right across New South Wales, as the South-East Corner of Queensland is told to brace for the worst, with weather experts not yet ruling out a proper Brisbane flood.
A flood warning has also been issued for Victoria’s East Gippsland and West and South Gippsland, with damaging winds and heavy rain expected to reach by the afternoon as the NSW low pressure system moves south.
With state governments now on high alert, the ‘hand-signal’ has been put out into the skies over major centres along the Eastern seaboard.
The Hand-Signal is a specially modified searchlight with a stylised emblem of the Auslan sign for ‘Wake Up’ affixed to the light, allowing it to project the symbol onto cloudy and stormy skies.
The iconic distress signal is reserved for only state premiers and the public broadcaster, as a call out for the nation’s superhero sign language translators, in the case of rolling TV press conferences for either natural disasters or other state of emergencies.
It has not been used in any city since the beginning of Melbourne’s catastrophic second COVID-19 wave on the 11th of July, when Dan Andrews began his first of 116 daily press conferences. Before that it was used almost weekly during the 2019 Black Summer Bushfires.
It is believed the Federal Minister For Emergency Management, David Littleproud, was forced to physically restrain Prime Minister Morrison from using the Hand-Signal and calling an emergency press conference to announced the roll-out of a couple thousands vaccines – in his even to take the spotlight off the Parliament House rape scandals earlier this month.
However, today as schools continue to shut down and arterial highways are cut off by floodwaters, the translators are being called back to the screens by Palaszczuk, Berejiklian and Andrews.
In Betoota’s much drier Old City District this afternoon, a Tinder hook-up has been cut short after one local translator spotted the Hand Signal out the window of a local Irish pub.
“I must go” the local superhero told his date.
“ABC24 needs me”
MORE TO COME.
