By Monday night, floodwaters had inundated the last route into the city, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said.

“Rockhampton is now completely stranded — a town of 75,000 people — no airport, rail or road,” Bligh told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Residents emptied supermarket shelves of food and bottled water in recent days as they stocked up to reduce the need to get around in waist-deep waters.

Acting Defense Minister Warren Snowdon said a C-130 military cargo plane would fly to a town north of Rockhampton on Monday carrying food, medical supplies and other items that would then be trucked to the stricken city.

Authorities have warned the Fitzroy will continue rising until late Tuesday or early Wednesday local time.

Mayor Brad Carter has said about 40 percent of the city could be affected by the surging waters, and residents could be forced to wait at least two weeks before returning home.

State authorities say about 200,000 people have been affected by the floods, Australia’s worst in a decade, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday extended emergency relief to those affected, including low-interest loans to farmers to begin cleaning up and get their businesses running again.

“This is a major natural disaster, and recovery will take a significant amount of time,” Gillard said. The damage could ultimately amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, she told reporters.

Three people have died in the flooding since Saturday, though police in Queensland state say seven other people have drowned separately involving swollen rivers and water accidents since tropical deluges began in late November.

Chief Superintendent Alistair Dawson said the latest victim was a man who drowned Monday when the car he was traveling in was washed off a flooded causeway in the town of Aramac, in central Queensland.

Earlier Monday, police said they had recovered the body of a man who was last seen Saturday when his small boat was swamped by raging waters in a different part of the state.

The rains that started the flooding have eased, and water levels have been dropping in some towns. But officials said about 1,000 people were living in evacuation centers across Queensland, and it may be a month before the floodwaters dry up completely.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

Bill McKibben is founder of the global climate campaign 350.org and a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont.

To give some sense of the devastation, we have compiled the clips of video footage — both from amateurs and news networks — which convey the extremity of these storms and the aftermath in the South.

The college town of Tuscaloosa, the home of the University of Alabama, was flattened by a vast tornado, captured on this AP video:

This raw AP video captures a tornado in Cullman County, Ala., dominating the sky:

In CCTV footage that looks like it’s been lifted from an apocalypse movie, you can see the precise moment when a tornado hits St. Louis’ Lambert airport a few day ago, blowing out windows and plunging the building into darkness:

This CNN video, taken earlier in the week, shows one Oklahoma family, shot against a lightning-struck sky and a background of rubble (once their belongings), recounting their experience of a tornado:

Amateur footage from Byars, Okla., shows tornado funnels forming in the sky one week ago:

And this AP video details the aftermath in Arkansas after severe storms hit on April 26, leaving 10 dead in the state:

Minutes earlier, an attempt to touch down in another isolated area with nearly 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of food, water and medical supplies had been aborted after what at first seemed to be flat dirt turned out to be nearly liquid mud that could have swamped the six-person helicopter.

Three men digging at the edge of the mud flat, their legs protected by trash bags tied around their thighs, were left behind for another mission.

This time Costa got the go-ahead: The space was tight, with sheer drops on three sides, but it was enough. He touched down on the grass and more a dozen women and children crowded around, barely waiting for the rotors to stop.

“We have almost no water left to drink, almost no food,” said Adriana Claudia de Melo, 31, gathering up the packages of rice, spaghetti, tomato sauce and bottled water. “We were starting to panic.”

Monday’s delivery was the first time Melo and nearly 30 other survivors stranded on a hilltop received aid from the government nearly a week after torrential rains unleashed avalanches of rocks and mud in these mountains. Many more families remained isolated by washed-out roads and bridges.

For days after the slides, residents in the most inaccessible areas were forced to fend for themselves, searching for the missing and the dead in the mud and constant rain, and then hiking provisions for hours up and down mountainsides.

Bad weather meant aircraft could not reach more than 20 neighborhoods and villages for days. A break in the rain and improved visibility on Sunday finally allowed 12 helicopters to begin taking supplies and rescue personnel in, and shuttling injured residents out.

Costa’s crew started flying Monday. Seen from the air, the scale of the destruction was even more striking: Dozens of crumbled cliffs stood out against the lush green; valleys had turned into muddy rivers; and rivers into silted mud flats, obliterating the communities along their banks.

The city’s wealthy often escape Rio’s heat to estates nestled in these forested peaks, which are also home to a national park. It was in their employer’s stately country house that Melo and the other residents of the cluster of homes called Mariana — caretakers, maids, ranch hands and others — took shelter after their homes were buried or heavily damaged by the slides.

For the five families huddled in the ranch house, the helicopter’s arrival staved off desperation.

Diesel fuel for the home’s generator was nearing its end, water in the cistern was low and food was being rationed — there were 30 people to feed. There was no phone line to call for help, or to get news of other family members.

Normally, Mariana is a 40-minute drive from Teresopolis, the nearest city. With the five bridges along the route wrecked and the access road washed away, the only way to get to town was a five-hour slog on foot, including several dangerous river crossings.

Larissa Francisco Carvalho, 14, showed off the bruises and cuts on her legs suffered during a trip to town for supplies.

“It’s too difficult with the water rushing by, carrying the bags of food,” she said. “We needed help.”

Maj. Roberto do Canto Wilkoszynski of the Brazilian National Security Force, who is in charge of coordinating the air rescue, said the helicopters started flying as soon as it was safe to do so.

“We can’t put the crews in danger,” he said. “But we are doing what we can, as fast as we can, and we intend to stay here as long as we need to complete this mission.”

And while neighbors helping each other was a valuable lifeline during the first days after the disaster, Do Canto Wilkoszynski said people now need to be careful due to the risk of further landslides, collapsing debris from destroyed homes and contamination from bodies decomposing in the humid heat.

“The ideal is to contact professionals and let them know what’s needed,” he said.

Back at a helicopter refueling stop in Teresopolis, slide survivor Rejane Melo, 34, sat among packs of bottled water after being airlifted from the remote neighborhood of Santa Rita, where 10 have been found dead.

“You see the state we are in here,” she said, motioning to her 6-year-old daughter, Ellen, and her 16-year-old son, Reginaldo, whose leg was amputated below the knee just days before the storms because of cancer. “We couldn’t walk out. We were left to God’s mercy.”

The family were not injured and their home was still standing. But it was left damaged and leaky, and Melo worried it could collapse at any moment in the ongoing rain. There was no water or electricity.

Staying became more unbearable each day, Melo said, as bodies began decaying under the debris, causing an overwhelming stench and raising fears of disease.

Then the helicopter showed up.

“We have to thank God in these moments,” Melo said.

After caring for the living, rescuers have to think of the dead. A still unknown number of victims lie under tons of red mud and rock in various valleys.

The first search teams with sniffer dogs arrived Sunday, sent by the National Security Force, which is made up of military troops from various states.

Many gained experience in this kind of work from massive landslides in 2008, but the rough terrain could pose new challenges, team leader Lt. Niccolo Inacio Alves de Sousa said.

How far the bodies were scattered by the rushing floodwaters, and how deep they are buried will determine how many will be found, he said. The search also will be hampered by the lack of heavy equipment, which can’t reach many slide sites due to collapsed infrastructure.

How long the house in Mariana will be cut off from town is unclear — rebuilding these rural bridges and roads is not an immediate priority. The five families stranded there fear that once the immediate rescue effort ends, they’ll be on their own to face a long recovery.

“We lost our bearings with this,” said Carvalho, the teenage girl with the bruised legs. “Now we’ll look to each other, and to God, for help.”