Floods caused by heavy rain in the wake of former Tropical Cyclone Jasper cut off several towns popular with tourists in Australia’s northeast along the Great Barrier Reef, with a crocodile being captured from a storm drain, writes Reuters.

Jasper dumped months’ worth of rain in the far north of Queensland state over the weekend, forcing some people to flee homes and crowd on rooftops to escape fast-rising rivers.

“The problem is the rain won"t stop and until it eases up, we can’t get aerial support into remote places. We see a lot of natural disasters and this is just about the worst I can remember”, - the state’s premier, Steven Miles, said.

Jasper was downgraded to a tropical low after leaving a trail of destruction across the state last week. In Ingham, a town of about 5,000 inundated by floods, conservation officials captured a 2.8-m long crocodile in a storm drain by a gas station, media clips showed. Crocodile sightings in north Queensland are more common in rivers, lagoons and swamps in rural areas, however.

Cairns, the gateway town to the Great Barrier Reef and home to more than 150,000 people, received about 600 mm of rain over 40 hours through early Monday. That is more than triple the December mean of 182 mm.