Cyclone Yasi - Gone in a flash(-flood)

Cyclone Yasi has gone but not before dumping oceans of rain over the southern side Australia, causing flooding in towns across the state of Victoria including Melbourne. Many homes, businesses and cars were flooded but fortunately not on a scale of what we experienced in Queensland.

 Flooding from McIvor Creek in Heathcote, Victoria. Picture: Darren Crees. Source: Herald Sun

At our apartment building, the lift was finally fixed on Friday so I was able to move the remaining appliances down to our new apartment and we could move in and unpack on the weekend.

The building managers are now getting quotes for redoing all the interior that was damaged by the river flooding. All the drywalls and doors on the first and second levels need to be replaced.

The foyer of our apartment building. Note the water level marks on the windows a metre high on the second level.

One of the good things that came out of this was that I was got tickets to see Sting's "Symphonicities" concert as thanks for the work I did at Volunteering Queensland. It was held at the River Stage last night - An open air venue in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. The concert features Sting singing/playing with Australian-born singer Jo Lawry and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (or a symphony orchestra of the country he's in). The weather was perfect and the concert was fantastic. If this show is coming to your city it's really worth going to see.

Cyclone Yasi - Deaths: 0. Births: 3

Well the strongest part of Cyclone Yasi has come and gone, though it is still due to hit Mt Isa (which is not is not a "Cyclone hardened" town) as a force 1 cyclone around about now. And so far there are no reports of deaths or injury, but 3 children were born during the storm - One of them in an evacuation centre.

There was a lot of property damage in the centre of the area it hit with hundreds of homes destroyed or very badly damaged, roofs ripped off, boats piled on top of each other, cars crushed by fallen trees, and tree trunks, branches and foliage everywhere. Fortunately the speed at which the cyclone was moving reduced a bit just before it hit which meant that arrived a bit after high tide, and because of that the storm surge wasn't as high as initially predicted. It also seemed to help that the buildings that were built in the past few years to new specifications (and those that survived Cyclone Larry in 2006) withstood the battering well, and the big towns of Cairns and Townsville survived pretty well.

Over 170,000 homes lost power but the main electricity transmission line held up.

 Hinchinbrook Marina in Cardwell
Photo: Sydney Morning Herald

Here is a selection of photos showing the results of the cyclone.

Imagine winds of 300km/h

Cyclone Yasi has developed into a category 5 cyclone - The highest category. This means that it will have gusts of around 300km/h or more. See here for more on cyclone categories.

Yasi is now beginning to hit the mainland with its centre just south of the town of Innisfail. Innisfail is 1,300km NW of Brisbane and is one of the places we visited last September. The strongest winds occur in the "eyewall" of the cyclone (the part that surrounds the calm eye) but the cyclone will cause storm winds up to 400km each side and will take about 12 hours to pass.We're not directly affected in Brisbane but it's really going to stretch the volunteers and emergency services who are still busy with the flood cleanup. After the cyclone has hit the coast it will weaken as it moves inland, but will still be a category 3 cyclone when it reaches the mining town of Mt Isa, 800km inland of Innisfail. This cyclone really is big. See its size here compared to other continents around the world.

Surprisingly it is not the winds that are the most dangerous element: More deaths occur because the wind pushes up a storm surge of water and the predictions are that this will be 7m above normal high tide at cyclone's centre. A storm surge doesn't rise slowly like the Brisbane river floods did but comes in in powerful waves. Many of the towns along the coast are barely above sea level so there are a lot of homes and businesses that going to be flooded. Tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate, though a few people have chosen to stay. As of now (9:30pm) no emergency services will operate or try to rescue anyone until the cyclone has passed as it is too dangerous to go out.

Cyclone Yasi on 2011-02-02 at 19h32 AEST (Queensland time), about to hit the coast

Once again the Queensland government's communication and management has been fantastic. The premier, Anna Bligh, and the police chief give TV news conferences every hour to give the latest information of what's happening, what people must do, and what is expected to happen over the next few days. The Queensland Police service also sends out messages of advice and informatinon on Twitter and Facebook every few minutes. One of the things Anna Bligh warned of is that the main electricity transmission line serving the whole of north Queensland is going to be hit by the cyclone and that may bring down one or more pylons. If it does then the whole of northern Queensland will be without power for some time.

In local news...
With the power on in our apartment building and the lights working at last I was able to move almost everything from our old apartment to the new apartment with the help of a man-with-a-van (though I didn't need his van). It's just the big appliances and couch that will need to wait until the lift is working. Just to add to the current challenges, someone reversed into our car yesterday so that now needs to go into the panel shop.

Lots more news sure to come.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

The good news is that our apartment building had power switched on yesterday. We're hoping that the lift and fire protection services will be repaired today. Now that the lights are on we will be able to see how much cleaning is still left to do. It will be a lot. I'm still discovering storerooms in the building I didn't even know existed that were flooded.

The bad news is that Cyclone Yasi is coming to Queensland. It's big. REALLY BIG!
In 2006 Cyclone Larry hit towns in northern Queensland in the area around Townsville to Cairns, and did hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Yasi is expected to be as strong as Larry but is much, much bigger - 500km across and making a spiral of clouds with a diameter of 2,000km. It will hit the coast tomorrow and it is expected it will have winds in excess of 250km/h, and some models predicting gusts up to 315km/h.

 Satellite view 1 February 2011

All the resorts in the Whitsundays (a long chain of beautiful, tropical, white-sand holiday islands along the coast) have been evacuated. There is some information on Yasi here.

I'll probably be writing more about this...

A Pictorial Post

I mentioned that we took a break last Sunday. We went for a walk along the road next to the river (the riverside walkway immediately next to the river was still closed) and through one of our favourite areas, Rosalie, which has quaint, traditional wooden "Queenslander" houses many and lovely, small restaurants and shops in a little village centre. Rosalie is about 1km from the river but is low lying so the water came flooding in there. Low-lying areas like this were flooded even if the water didn't find a path on the surface, as it also came bubbling up from storm-water drains when the river reached a level higher than the drains.

Here are some of the photos I took along the way. Click on any photo to view it in a bigger size. All the photos in used in this blog and more of the floods are in an online album here, where you can see on a map where each photo was taken or view a slideshow of the whole lot..

The remains of the Regatta ferry terminal. The poles sticking up on the left are where the boarding platform used to be, with a jetty linking it to the waiting area on the right. All the other ferry terminals are in a similar state so it will be months (years?) before they are all operating again

A piece of a jetty from one of the ferry terminals

The badly damaged Drift Restaurant after being raised from the riverbed. This had to be intentionally sunk during the flood when it looked like it might break free from its moorings and damage bridges downstream.

The appreciation shown by the owners of shops at Rosalie. Note the high-water mark on the blackboard on the bottom photo.

Still Homeless

We took the day off on Sunday. It felt like we were on holiday!

On Monday I did some more cleanup at our apartment building. Getting the pool back in shape has been on the back-burner but I saw that it needed a quick fix to prevent it becoming a nursery for mosquitoes and other nasties. I picked up a big tub of chlorine from the pool shop and threw a bunch of that in. It definitely did something as within a few minutes several fish popped up to the surface gasping for air.

 

Before the flood

After

It's going to take a lot of work to clean it, as it's a vinyl-lined pool which means that it would be damaged if all the water was pumped out - The water that's in has to be cleaned.

The rest of the week I'm doing more IT work at Volunteering Queensland, but yesterday was Australia Day. We didn't do the traditional beach 'n barbie though - Christine went to work and I helped a flooded friend throw out flood-damaged cupboards at his house in the morning and spent the rest of the day packing boxes at our apartment so that we can move as soon as the building is liveable again. Speaking of that, the power might be restored tomorrow, and then it will just be a few more days to get the lift and fire services fixed up before we can move in. There's still mud in the garages so Sunday is a mud-working day again.

60,000 Volunteers Can't be Wrong

It's been a busy few days:

On Thursday I went to help out at Manny & Meg's Art Shed in West End. They carry a huge amount of stock normally, and when the floods came they only had time to rescue selected goods. They had to turf a huge pile of art supplies, and are trying to save another massive amount that was flood damaged which they will sell cheap or donate. I spent the morning cleaning tubes of paint, paintbrushes and other drawing materials together with other volunteers, including an ex-South African who had flown down from Cairns to help & a Bosnian sculptor who lives in Brisbane. Art supplies can cost a lot - I rescued a couple of thousand dollars worth in the time I was there.

 The inside of the Art Shed

One of the many bags of soiled stock

 Volunteers washing art supplies

Organising the stock that was saved from the floods

In the afternoon I went to help out at Volunteering Queensland - The organisation that puts volunteers together with the councils, emergency services, non-profits and charities that need them. Initially I was going to work on taking calls from volunteers or entering information into a database, but I quickly realised that most of the volunteers and permanent staff there are more "socially minded" than technology minded so I could help a lot more sorting out the data that had already been collected of 60,000+ volunteers. They realised that too and I quickly got given more tasks to do so went back on Friday (yesterday) and today. One of the things they were getting other volunteers to do is to copy registration information from emails from another 8,000 volunteers into their database one-by-one. I found a way to do it in one go it caused a bit of consternation today when they realised that I had just put ten volunteers out of work until they could find something else they needed them to do.

Our apartment repairs are going well but still needs work. Our lease ended today officially and we were supposed to move to the apartment downstairs, but everyone involved has agreed that it can wait until the building is habitable again. We have also convinced the owner to waive rent from when we had to evacuate and we will donate the rent money to the Flood Relief Fund instead - Actually on behalf of Charl & Joanna seeing as we're staying with them. Hopefully we will be able to move back to our apartment around the end of January.

It's been hard work the past couple of weeks. I'm going to take the day off tomorrow!

A change of pace - The tradies are coming

With most of the thick mud cleared and almost all the water-damaged goods and rubbish now removed from the pavements, the focus has been on getting the tradies lined up to quote and repair: Electricians, carpenters, carpet layers...

Wednesday 18/1/2011 after the floods - A much quieter and cleaner street

At our apartment building yesterday the electrician, lift technicians and plumbers (pumping out the lift shaft) were all busy.

I cleared the last of the rubbish and did some more cleaning, but most importantly cleaned the big gas barbie which, fortunately, had been chained to the wall. After all what's the point of having a roof over you head if you don't have a barbie out the back?

The foyer of our apartment building

 

Tomorrow I'm off to help Brisbane's favourite art-supply shop - The Art-Shed - recover from being flooded.
It's a great shop that carries a wide range of stock, but is located in the basement of a building, so once the water came in it didn't stand a chance. The entire place was left filled with a mush of paper, paints, canvasses and brushes. Have a look at the photos on their web site, and if you're in Brisbane please support them.

In the afternoon I'm going to help Volunteering Queensland - The organisation managing volunteers for the cleanup - with "databasing" the thousands of emails they've received with offers of help.

Signs of Progress

I decided to give the mud-wallowing a skip until I got my tetanus shot, which I'd booked for the afternoon. Instead I sorted out our apartment.

For about 2 weeks before the flood we had been finding a lot of ants in the apartment. I guess that with all the rain they just wanted somewhere dry, and found a nice cosy spot in the drywalls. We had been keeping them under control, but by the time I got back there today they were having a great party. Also we had cleared out the fridge of perishables but it was desperate for a good clean, and needed to clear out the cupboards of open packets of biscuits, pasta, etc.

Things were far quieter at the apartment building with the weekend workers having returned to their paid jobs, but the council workers, rural fire fighting service and volunteer bobcat drivers cleaning out the road and building entrance. With all that work the building is finally becoming recognisable.

Residents were busying themselves with sorting out their personal things: Washing recovered photos, carrying boxes out, etc.

We also heard today that the Energex - The electricity supply company - said that they have been able to clean the flooded substation rather than having to replace it as we expected. That makes a great difference. If available tradies can be found to sort out all the other things we might be able to move back into the apartments in 2 or 3 weeks. The other niceties (like new carpets on the floors) will probably take longer.

Some measure of normality is starting to return to other parts of Brisbane as well: Roads are opening up, trains are back on schedule and people are going back to work. The grass is starting to flourish too - All that free "fertilizer" seems to be doing wonders for it.


But there is still a lot of work to be done.
Now that I've had my tetanus injection it will probably be hard labour for me again tomorrow.

Answers to questions

In answer to some questions I've been asked:

Q: Once the volunteers have done what they can, there will be many properties needing structural repair or even reconstruction, in many cases beyond the financial capacity of the owners to pay. Since people have apparently not been able to get insurance against an event like this, presumably the government will provide funds to supplement ( if that's the right word for a ratio of 100 to 1) the donations. Has anything been said about this aspect?

A: You're right that there will be a HUGE amount of work for the "tradies" - electricians, plumbers, plasterers (or "plasterboard fitters"), fire-alarm people, etc. They will be booked up for months or years.
There are currently volunteers offering all kinds of help. For example I have volunteered to a group who are offering assistance to businesses and sole-proprietors to source donated computer equipment and help get their IT systems up and running again.

People are able to get flood insurance but many did not have because it is expensive and they never dreamed that the water would reach them. The "Great flood of 1974" wasn't supposed to happen again after the Wivenhoe Dam was built. There will probably also be some negotiation over the cover, as some policies cover for "storm damage" but not flooding, some cover for "creek flooding" but not "river flooding", etc.

Those that are not covered need to foot the cost themselves but I guess that those that are in dire need will get some kind of help from the government. The government and City Council are busy looking at many post-flood issues but I haven't seen any official announcement about that particular issue yet. One of the things I have read is that the council is looking at buying back properties in flood-affected areas. They already have a policy for this in place, eg where riverfront properties are bought back and turned into public footpaths or parks.

Q: In the meantime, people whose houses are not habitable will need to find longer term accommodation. Another difficult problem! Any idea how many this will apply to? 

A: I think the majority of people will have to stay with friends and family until they are able to move back into their own homes - even if the homes are not completely restored. While the electricity to our apartment building will hopefully be restored within a couple of weeks, there are buildings nearby who's electrical distribution rooms were flooded and I've been told that it is expected to take around 3 months to repair. That's about 40 families per building.

Q: It seems surprising the number of cars and other things that might have been saved were left. I notice  that at least one couple thought the upper level of your garages would be safe.  You were evidently more cautious or better informed. Were the estimates of flood levels not sufficiently accurate at the time people were warned to evacuate?

A: We were just lucky. Up until Monday all the attention had been on the already-flooded towns like Rockhampton and the terrible flash flood at Toowoomba. On Monday night, one of the managers from the body corporate told us that the river was expected to rise on the Wednesday and Thursday and so they were going to put sandbags at the entrance to the ground floor garages ("G1") the next day as a precaution. There had been a couple of king tides (spring tides) in the weeks before that had pushed the river up over walkways and onto some roads in other parts of the city. But it had come no where near the level of our building so I thought they were being very cautious.

On Tuesday morning I moved the car out to the street so that we could use it later in the day rather than it being trapped in by the sandbag wall, and JUST in case the water really did come up. I also moved the things in our garage up to our apartment - Luckily I was at home and able to do that. By late morning the water was rising surprisingly high up the riverbank and I spent the rest of the day helping neighbours move goods up from their garages to their apartments and to other garages and the pool room on the second level ("G2"). People had so much stuff in their garages that there wasn't time to get everything up. One of the residents was in the process of moving and had their entire tandem garage (11m x 4m) packed floor to ceiling with all their possessions - Theirs was a lost cause. Another resident was away and the car in their garage could not be moved.

By the afternoon the water was getting close to floor level on G1 and it was pouring with rain. The truck delivering sand for sandbags had got stuck in traffic so we dug up the garden and filled the bags with soil and packed them around entrances. The water was also closing in on the electricity supply box outside and there was an electrician standing by who gave us good warning that the power was going to be cut. Fortunately there was an emergency generator which kept the lights in the garages on and the lift working.

By late afternoon the message came through that the water might get as high 1 or 2m inside the garages on G1, and that if we had another place we could stay we should seriously consider leaving - with the power out and the sewage pump stopped it wouldn't be good to stay there. While it was still light we packed some clothes and perishables from the fridge and went to our friends. During Tuesday night and Wednesday morning warnings were given about a much bigger increase in the river level during the peak of the king tides on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday combined with the water coming down the river, and we realised how high the water was really going to come. The communications given by the Brisbane City Council and Queensland state government were fantastic. The mayor and premier gave live media briefings every couple of hours informing people of what their flood-modelling experts expected and what people should be doing. They also showed computer models of how the city would flood and made available online maps showing which streets would be flooded.

In the end, the water in our building filled up G1 and reached about 1m high on G2 - The level where people had taken their possessions for safety, and where 3 cars had been left in their garages. Many other people around the city had been in similar situations and/or were not at home to be able to do anything.

Another factor is that it was not just areas on the banks of the Brisbane River which were flooded: Places far from the river which I wouldn't have expected to flood, but were low-lying or near a small creek were also underwater. One example is the area Rocklea which is where the fresh produce market is located. It's far from the Brisbane River and is the main distribution point for all of Queensland, and it was wiped out - Dozens of big warehouses mangled, and overturned trucks and semi-trailers strewn about.

Here's a good video summary of the floods in Brisbane showing our building and surrounding areas. Most of this is taken around our area and includes a shot of our apartment building.

Dumpster Diving and Good Food

No, those two thoughts don't usually go together. But they did today.

This morning we started off going to buy some closed shoes for me. Every shop in Brisbane is sold out of gumboots so I just got some disposable walking shoes instead. My feet and hands are already full of holes from blisters and cuts which is really not a good idea in this mud. I heard from three medical sources today that it's an ABSOLUTE MUST for anyone who's been in the mud to get a tetanus shot, and probably a course of antibiotics too. The bacteria in this sludge are terrible!

We also bought some supplies for friends who are cleaning out their flooded new house. We dropped off their supplies and commiserated over the extensive damage to their place with all the hard work they've put into it, then went to our own apartment building and got going with cleaning out the grounds around it. There was sludgy mud - Lots of it - Covering the driveway, footpaths, garden, and flower beds. We commandeered anything that had wheels and used it to cart the mud down to the river - Shopping carts, wheelbarrows, wheely-bins.

Mud, I've discovered, is really heavy so it was dirty and exhausting work. But once again volunteers turned up from all over Brisbane and beyond to come help - Including our friend Charl. A volunteer web site was used to allow people who wanted to help to register on a database. The organisers had expected 7,000-8,000 people to register. They got 50,000. Volunteer meeting points had been set up all around the city and volunteers were given ID cards and bussed from there to wherever they were needed. Others just walked around neighbourhoods finding flooded buildings and offering to help. We had about 200 people working in our building and on the street today.

Some of the couple of hundred residents and volunteers cleaning up in our street

Once we got the mud out of the way we made a start on getting rid of goods. We had to clear out the garages completely to be able to clean them, so goods got dumped regardless of whether they were water-damaged or not (unless the owner was very quick in claiming items). Miraculously a queue of dump trucks arrived and we spent much of the day throwing cupboards, beds, mattresses, boxes of books, tools, family photos, paperwork, and spadefuls of unrecognisable gunk, all of it soggy and dripping with fetid brown water.

Just some of the stuff removed from garages in our apartment building, waiting to go to the tip

Meanwhile other people continued cleaning the insides of the garages, foyer, storerooms, boiler room, generator room and other rooms I didn't even know existed. It's constant work of spraying and sweeping, spraying and sweeping. The dirt is extremely difficult to get off.

Once again, the volunteer corps surprised me. Over the past few days many people had come to realise that the workers get hungry, and so throughout the day today there were strangers walking around handing out bottles of water (which they opened for us so that we didn't get the neck dirty), cool-drinks, beer, individually-wrapped sandwiches, biscuits, wraps, cake and home-made cookies. One guy even came driving around in his ute with boxes of curry and rice on the back, offering to feed anyone who was still hungry.

And it was all so good!. 

The current status of the building is that it is not inhabitable (no power, drainage not working, lift trashed, no fire alarms, etc, etc, etc, etc). It will take two weeks at best to get power on again, and then there's still all the other repairs to do - Things like fixing the lift, repainting, fixing the emergency generator, replacing the smoke alarms, replacing damaged / removed doors, replacing carpets and repairing the collapsed ceiling in the foyer. The bottom two levels of the building are currently just a shell. We are very grateful to our friends Charl and Joanna who have given us such a great place to stay. There are so many thousands of people who's homes are now also uninhabitable that I'm sure it will be impossible to find another furnished place to rent in the meantime. 

More cleaning and dumpster diving tomorrow. And a tetanus shot!

Day 2 of the cleanup

We're all exhausted after another day of cleaning up our apartment building. With it being a Saturday, Christine was not working at the City Council and so came to help as well. So did our friends Anj, Sam, Kevin, Bryan and Charl. And a whole lot of friends of other residents. And a whole bunch of complete strangers. All in all there were about 100 or more people working today. It was incredible how everyone dived right in and worked so hard.

Besides the people working inside there were also volunteers with machinery clearing the outside areas and the road of mud and dumped goods.

Today we got the upper-level garages looking a bit cleaner, ripped out carpets in the pool room and other common areas, and cleared out and washed the lower level garages. The amount of peoples' goods that is being dumped is unbelievable.
It's amazing that there haven't been any major injuries.With so many people working in a confined space, walking of slimy mud; Carrying heavy boxes and furniture; The floor littered with broken glass, tiles, sharp pieces of metal and nails; Brooms, rakes, spades and wheelbarrows lying all over the places and being moved around constantly; And all this in in almost complete darkness (except for when someone comes along with a headlamp or lantern) because the power is out.


I'm starting to look a little worse for wear, with cuts and scrapes and blisters. And working in this festering sludge is not good for that. I really need to get some close shoes at least. I'm also starting to feel rather stiff.

There is still a long way to go. The clean up will take months, and the rebuilding of Brisbane's facilities will take years.

More pictures from today are up on our online album.

Tomorrow is another day.
Goodnight.

Toxic Sludge

Today was the start of the cleanup at our apartment building. MESSY!

I had expected to go along, quickly spray out the garages and help some neighbours remove some flooded stuff, and then head over to help friends who's beautiful house that they built just a year ago was completely flooded.

Boy was I wrong!
The sludge is thick, slimy, slippery, oily, smelly and sticky. And TOXIC! I tried not to think what was in it while spending the day ankle-deep with my nice new Merrell sandals and getting sprayed and splashed with it from head to toe.

The sludge is too thick to sweep easily so we started off picking the thickest of it up with shovels and carting it out in wheelbarrows, but that was a slow process. We then tried spraying it out with the firehose and chasing it out with brooms but that was also a slow process - Although it was easier to sweep the additional water meant there was so much more to get out. There was just so much of it - Each level of the garage area is about 40m by 40m so that's a lot of sludge..

There were 20-30 of us there the whole day and we didn't even finish the upper garages. We still need to clean out the lower-level garages, the pool room/gym, the sauna, the bathrooms, the entrance areas and the outside areas.

I was very happy to be able to come home to a nice clean house, and to have a hot bath with disinfectant and a shower.

Once our place is clean I will go help other people. This is going to take a while.

But people have been fantastic. Young and old people from the building were working really hard today. Someone organised pizzas and drinks for all the workers. Friends of residents came along to help. Strangers are driving around looking for people who need help. Lots of good spirit around.

I've added photos from today to our online album here.

Goodnight

Queensland Floods - Update 13/1/2011

Hello from a flooded but sunny Brisbane

The flooding is mainly from the rivers flowing through Brisbane from inland - Not from rain on Brisbane. So it's quite strange to have flooding with good weather.

The river peaked in the night. This morning I went for a walk to see if I could get near our flat but all the roads around are flooded so I couldn't get near. The current count for Brisbane is that 12,000 homes are completely flooded  with more than 26,000 homes and 5000 businesses in 67 suburbs  "affected" (flooded or partially flooded). More than 150 roads remain closed, thousands of cars and boats destroyed, and the city remains mostly shut-down, with power and public transport still shaky. Some streets in the CBD are flooded, all the ferry terminals have been destroyed, many of the bike paths are underwater, and the trains and buses have been disrupted.

Many of the nicest facilities like the man-made "Streets Beach" (a big, sand-bottom swimming pool) at Southbank, the Queensland Gallery of Art, all the waterfront restaurants at Eagle Pier, the Southbank Parklands, Kangaroo Point park and many other parks are also flooded.

In all of Queensland 15 people have died and 61 people missing which is actually very low considering all the damage - The management and communications from the police and city council have been fantastic.

Here are before and after pictures of our apartment building (the one on the left).
The people in the "After" picture had a lot of furniture in their garage on the ground level which we helped them move up to an empty garage on the second level on Tuesday. However it looks like the second level was partly flooded too.

Here's a video of what's been going down the Brisbane River
http://au.news.yahoo.com/video/national/-/watch/23820458/brisbane-river-will-peak-tomorrow/
If the video keeps stopping and starting, click on the pause button (just underneath the video), wait a minute, then click it again to resume playing.

The river stayed high all day and started going down this evening. But it's when the water subsides that the real problems start. The water is a sludge contaminated with sewage, oil & petrol from flooded petrol stations and cars, chemicals from factories, dead animals, etc. And that is inside walls and floors of buildings and vehicles. Even though we will be able to get into our flat in a few days time I expect it will take a while until all the services are restored to the building, it is all cleaned and the smell is gone.

Christine went back to work today. The Fortitude Valley council building is on high ground, and we are able to get there by car. Christine & one other person were the only 2 City Waste staff members in the office today. All other staff were driving around assessing waste issues in suburbs, busy in the emergency planning centres, personally affected by flooding or can't get to work due to transport issues.

All is well otherwise. The friends we're staying with have a lovely house, and we're stocked up with food, wine and Toblerone.

I've added some more photos to our online Floods photo album here.

Any questions?
Bye for now

Queensland Floods - Update

We spent this afternoon digging up the nice gardens of our apartment building to fill sandbags, and stacking them around all the entrances and over stormwater drains. Even so, we've had to evacuate.
Our apartment is high enough to be dry, but the building was almost an island, the power is off, drains will start getting backed up, no rubbish collection, etc. And that might last for a week or two.

The river rose so much today that the water was coming into the front entrance of the building (even though we sandbagged it), and tomorrow and Thu it's predicted to be 3.5m higher than today!!!!

They reckon the flood will be worse than the legendary/infamous 1974 floods that covered most of Brisbane.

We're now staying with our friends up the road in Toowong. Should be okay here.

See our pics here.

Queensland Floods

Hi

The floods which weren't affecting us now are.

The river has risen very high - It's now just starting to lap at the level of our garage, so we moved our car to a higher road and moved our camping stuff into our apartment. We've also been helping neighbours who had their garages filled floor to ceiling with boxes of stuff - Mostly which they claim belong to their children who asked them to store things.

The river is going to rise a lot more tomorrow and Thursday, so our garage will definitely be flooded and we'll be without electricity shortly.

The town of Toowoomba, about 100km W of Brisbane got hit really badly with a flash flood yesterday. For some dramatic videos, see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt-FT-skins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEBIZ2KLsPA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUpkPTcqPY

Otherwise all well :-)