Saturday's disaster was on a par with the 1998 floods in terms of the havoc it wrought, according to Wollongong Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery.
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The shocking thing, he said, was the "short and sharp" nature of the storm - raining for several hours and then the sun breaking through by 8.30am.
"In '98 it seemed to be more concentrated pockets of heavy rainfall whereas this one was the full link of the Local Government Area and beyond," Cr Bradbery said.
"This was certainly up there with one of the largest, most devastating rainfall events we've had for a while."
He said it highlighted the problems of climate change, "where these events are more intense, higher volume, higher velocity".
The clean-up has already started for the council, with urgent works done over the weekend and, in the coming days, it will inspect its infrastructure for damage.
"Council took the initiative and was on the job very early on Saturday morning and it's still continuing today," Cr Bradbery said on Sunday.
"It's prioritising the clean-up mainly in areas where it was essential that we got in and removed debris and mud, just to get people in and out of their homes.
"It'll take weeks for us to clean it all up - there's a lot of debris still about - but the priority was to get transport moving and people getting access to their streets."
The bulk of the damage to council assets is expected to be related to the road network, and the announcement of state and federal disaster recovery funding will help in the repair work.
"That means that we can get funding to help us with the costs of cleaning up and the restoring of our essential public assets," Cr Bradbery said.
"We're eligible under that scheme for funding so hopefully that will cover things like the cost of staff and the labour and materials and so on for the clean-up and help us in restoring what assets have been damaged."