SYDNEY (Reuters) – Two hikers, one of them a child, were killed on Monday and two people were critically injured in a landslide on a hiking trail in the Blue Mountains national park west of the Australian city of Sydney, police said.
The landslide on the Wenthworth Falls hiking track follows weeks of wet weather in Sydney. The Blue Mountains get 4 million tourists a year, the most of any national park in Australia.
A man and a boy were killed in the landslip and paramedics were preparing to winch out a woman and another child who were injured, Detective Superintendent John Nelson, from the Blue Mountains area command, told reporters.
“It’s quite a tragic scene. We do have a girl who is walking out at the moment and is clearly extremely distressed,” he said, adding that the area of the family bushwalking track down a valley was extremely dangerous and unstable.
The injured hikers had suffered head and abdominal injuries, paramedics said.
The nationalities of the hikers were not known.
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham; Editing by Robert Birsel)
