Devastating floods in Australia: Over 100,000 livestock dead or missing

More than 100,000 cattle and sheep are estimated to be dead or missing in the devastating flooding continuing in outback Queensland, Australia.

Early numbers confirmed by the Queensland Department of Primary Industries (DPI) estimate 105,348 livestock are missing or deceased, Caliber.Az reports, citing Western media sources.

There are an estimated 13.3 million head of cattle, about 2.7 million sheep and some 713,000 goats in Queensland.

The DPI also confirmed 3,183 kilometres of fencing had been impacted, along with 4,076km of private roads.

Those number are expected to increase in the coming days.

The department said some 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) of road had been flooded -- a distance greater than the famed Route 66 connecting Chicago to Los Angeles.

Flood waters stretched some 500,000 square kilometres (190,000 square miles) across sparsely populated western Queensland, Perrett said, a landmass roughly equivalent to France.

Industry body AgForce told local media some cattle ranches may have lost almost 100 percent of their herd.

The government Bureau of Meteorology said some towns had recorded as much as 500 millimetres (20 inches) of rain in the space of a week -- their typical yearly total.

By Khagan Isayev