Australian rainfall December 2010
That BOM map shows in terms of percentage of averages where it’s been raining in Australia in December. In Queensland it has been up to six times and more compared to the average. This map shows the actual millimetres:
December 2010 rainfall in Qld
You may recall that we had SW Queensland awash back in March. Some parts at the eastern edge of that event have had a second dose this time. Also Central Queensland and Emerald in particular had major floods back in 2008.
Sundry facts make the mind reel. Emerald (pop. 12,000) is 80% under water.
According to The Brisbane Times:
DEVASTATING floods, inundating an area the size of France and Germany and costing the economy $6 billion are set to worsen over the weekend with 22 Queensland communities isolated.
Analysts predict the floods, which have affected more than 200,000 people, will cost the economy $6 billion, not including clean-up costs, with mining and agriculture the worst affected.
Some 38 local council regions have been declared disaster areas.
The town of Condamine (pop. 100) was totally evacuated to Dalby.
Theodore (pop.350) was totally evacuated to a mining camp at Moura. Around Theodore 100% of cotton crops will be lost.
Bundaberg (pop. 50,000) was cut in two.
The floods are yet to peak in Rockhampton (pop. 75,000). I heard one estimate that 4000 homes may need to be evacuated.
The ABC tell us there may be worse to come. Its true, of course, that it doesn’t normally rain all that much in Rockhampton before Christmas. The wettest months would tend to be January to March. That last sentence is true of Brisbane as well and the prevailing La Niña is expected to last through to autumn.
In many places the flood waters move slowly and it could be weeks before people get back into their homes. It’s crook when your home and your supermarket go under. Crook too when such essential infrastructure as the sewerage plant and the water purification plant are flooded. Dalby had fresh water problems while the town was flooded.
The 7.30 Report has had excellent coverage of the floods for the last few nights.
ABC online has been good. There are masses of photos sent in by people. Here’s a sample of the rising floods in Emerald:
Emerald floods
This pic shows Rockhampton locals on the important mission of saving a beer fridge or two:
Rockhampton locals rescue beer fridge
Do you know that you can’t buy salt for your swimming pool on the east coast of Australia? Apparently it’s made in Rockhampton and the works are under water.
ABC local radio has been magnificent. They even put the cricket off the air in favour of an information service, very handy in keeping in touch with on-ground conditions and interviews with service providers.
Police have begun to lose patience and have charged some clowns who have put themselves in harm’s way.
The size of the area affected may take some city-dwellers a bit to get their head around. We are talking mainly about the Fitzroy Basin (the second largest in Australia, nearly as big as Victoria and over 700 km from north to south), the Burnett and the Condamine-Balonne.
In SEQ and Brisbane we’ve had plenty of rain as you can see from the map. There has been flash flooding in creeks and low areas where the drainage frankly, I think, is under-engineered. One charming manifestation has been the appearance of sewage in parks, yards and even homes. A bright spark from Urban Utilities opined that all that was to be expected since we’d had 57mm in one day. I wonder where they found him. That kind of precipitation is altogether normal in these parts!
You can donate online to the Premier’s Disaster Fund or call 1800 219 028. For other community assistance and information go here.
Update: Thanks to commenter Blair, BOM has just published a special climate statement on the floods (and the rainfall leading up to them), which you can find here.
I’ve uploaded Figure 5 Flood peaks in eastern Australia over the period 26 November 2010 – 7 January 2011.
Flood peaks in eastern Australia over the period 26 November 2010 – 7 January 2011.
Which would make the affected area equal to the total size also of Pakistan. It seems we into hemisphere tit for tat weather extremes.
Yes, BilB, but I don’t think the mechanisms involved are a mirror image of each other. I stayed away from attribution and AGW, but I think it’s a bit of both – natural variations and human-caused warming.
On the TV last night we were told that 123 individual rainfall records were broken in Qld in 2010, which is way beyond the normal, apparently. And then there was a huge number of cases where the events were severe, but came in just short of a record.
Certainly not a mirror, Brian, but the influences as you point out in many ways are the same.
Increasing ocean temperature
Increased atmospheric H2O
Melting ice caps
Increased atmospheric energy due to CO2 trapping and CH4.
I hadn’t figured in the atmospheric H2O increase, but that fits very well with the outcomes.
Did you see the presentation by Dr Tony Haymet the head of SCRIPPS institution last night or yesterday? Absolutely no comfort there. The same, more of the same, and even more of the same ^2, is what we have to look forward to. Dr Haymet had no words of encouragement for the geoengineers amoungst us.
The 4000 Rockhampton homes that are anticipated to go under with a flood peak on Tuesday is a staggering situation particularly if the flood level is expected to linger. Shots of fast flowing floodwaters are an added concern and the $1 million pledge of Queensland and Federal Governments won’t go far. As natural disasters go we could be looking at a very big one, perhaps deserving of an inquiry to assess preparedness, levees, building codes etc,. The Darwin cyclone comes to mind.
pablo, the Qld Govt and the feds chipped in a million each, Coles I think chucked in a million and the latest I heard the fund stood at $7 million. Houses flooded were getting $1000 each for every adult and $400 per child for immediate help.
It seems that a lot of the low-lying homes don’t have insurance, because they can’t get it. Many of these are battlers, but there was one story in Emerald of a “dream home”, built after their property suffered some disaster in 2005, that has now gone under twice. You do wonder about building codes in these places.
The problem in places like Emerald and Rockhampton is that the flooded places are flat and the water is very slow-moving. Early on there were a lot of stories of people being caught in fast-flowing water.
Road damage has been humungous. The implications for the Qld state budget don’t bear thinking about.
Just hope people caught in the floods are as okay as can be.
BilB, you might recall that in the Northern hemisphere case of Russian heat and the Paki floods and some other events, there was a kink in the jet stream that was held static by a blocking high. Both were natural variations, though rare. What was ‘unnatural’ was the intensity of what happened through extra heat and water vapour.
There were possibly other overlays, similar to that one about highs caused by clear Arctic seas that were AGW and contributed.
I guess it’s similar here. La Ninas and vigorous early monsoons are not unknown, but the intensity of what happens is turned up.
I think the negative Indian dipole wouldn’t normally have an effect in the NE of the continent, but there does seem to be a pattern of upper air lows floating over from the west or SW which turn on the tap when they reach the moisture in the east. I don’t know what causes them.
Overall there is a scary feeling that the systems are out of whack and we are in new territory.
Paul B @ 6, I think that mostly they are and you repeatedly see people say on TV “We’ll cope” but you do see some where the implications are clearly tragic, sometimes financially but some personally as well.
Longer term there have to be effects on relationships etc.
Brian @ 8,
I try to imagine how I would cope in their situation, and I reckon I’d be gutted. Don’t think i’d have that stoicism if I lost my books and notes. DVD, TV set top Box, okay you can always get a new one -but offer stuff, no.
I also think of renters who can’t ensure and lose heaps. The situation is terrible for these people. I’ll have to send some money next pension day or something. Probably a bank down here I can go into and donate something.
As a kid I loved floods because it usually meant the road to town was closed and the bus couldn’t take us to school. Instead we would go looking for turtles and the like along the edge of the floodplain. I hope those in the midst of the misery manage to find some such simple delights. Although obviously it’s tough when your livelihood is on the line.
Thanks for the cool maps.
That area of zero rain in the middle of Cape York is weird.
Presumably all this water will be good for our river systems.
“That area of zero rain in the middle of Cape York is weird.”
Compare it with the other map, which shows around 300% for that place. It’s obviously an input error, someone has entered zero for one particular station when it should have been a couple of hundred mm.
Katz @ 11, I noticed that one. You’d have to think that God singled you out for special treatment, or something!
TerjeP, not sure floods to that degree are a good thing. In Central Queensland they are apt to bear special gifts, courtesy of open-cut mines pumping water plus sundry metals and toxins to try to clean out their mines.
Brian, I’m not convinced by “a kink in the jet stream” theory. The way that I am perceiving it there are various “opinions”, so I’m sticking with the “what goes up must come down” thinking. Low pressure cells are uppers and high pressure cells are downers. A downer will be to the west of an upper and in a roughly similar time frame usually. I look for couples of similar mass flow.
If we can deliver NBN to every home on the continent why can’t we pipeline some of that lovely water over here? C Y OConnor got it right over a hundred years ago, piping water with a pipeline you can stil touch and understand today, from Kalgoorlie to Perth. So is it really impractical to view that exponentially and to consider it as a national option?
Remembering his suicide in 1902, after years of dealing with criticism and political struggle, let’s hope the NBN gets completed without similar tragedy.
We’re all right where we are in Rocky, but the floods mean that the supermarkets are very short of basic food items like milk and bread, and we haven’t seen potatoes or onions for several days (we are lucky that my husband seems to consider us always on the verge of an onion crisis and buys heaps at a time). The river is looking pretty scary, most of the suburb of Depot Hill is underwater, the airport is now closed and highways north, south and west are impassable. Apparently in the past, food has come up via barge from Gladstone to Rosslyn Bay. There’s also some talk that the waste treatment and water treatment plants might be under threat this time.
What worries me now is what happened in the 2009 floods – the bloody coal mines pumping out all of the toxic water into the river systems, as well as higher food prices from all of the produce that was ruined in Bundaberg. I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing cheap tomatoes for some time.
Patricia, because pumping water that far is too costly. It’s cheaper to just desalinate locally, as Perth already does.
See this old but pertinent article from John Quiggin about Colin Barnett’s canal proposal back in 2005.
Thanks for your response, Robert. It helps simplistics like me understand more of the realities of these things. Interesting that Barnett was something of a visionary in his earlier years.
PatWA – the Kalgoorlie pipeline only works economically because it literally leads to a goldmine.
Brian,
Have you any data to back your claim @13. I know that mines did/do? pump saline water during heavy river flows but i doubt you could measure the effect. Rest of the time most mines are expected to keep water from pits and washeries within the lease.
John, they may be getting in early this time, but back in 2008 I think it was fairly certain that they got special dispensation to pump stuff into the river at more than the normal rate.
This time they are claiming that it will be so diluted that it’s OK.
There was another humungous flood, this time in the north and northwest, in early 2009. On that occasion I think it was beyond doubt that the mines in the NW leaked toxic waste. In the post on that flood I said this:
So data, no, but suspicions, yes.
Brian, the “mine pumping” stuff is a beat up. It gets trotted out now every time there is a flood, never with any evidence, and it just starts to become an urban myth (“So data, no, but suspicions, yes”).
It’s based mainly on what happened at Ensham Mine during the 2008 flood. Their levee with the Nogoa River broke through and flooded the pit. Some of the water was pumped back whence it came (the Nogoa). No discernable effect but a gold mine to dark suspicions. And a massive increase in the size, complexity and constraints of the Water Management sections of the Environmental Authority agreements for every mine in the Bowen Basin (as well as a bunch of lessons that allowed improvements in flood preparation).
I think you may be surprised (and possibly impressed) by the amount of work that goes into water management and flood preparation at mines. (COI Alert – I work in a Bowen Basin coal mine)
Today in these parts high in the Fitzroy watershed, we have again gained road acess out. Still no landline as it was washed out where one creek that has deepened & widened itself; it brought down big river gums which were undermined. Road damage is everywhere.
The mines in CQ are pumping out contaminated water into the river system. Futher south in the Surat basin gas fields I have photos of evaporation ponds going under floodwater & of course concentated salts flushed out. Another photo of a drillrig & camp going under in a flood in these parts earlier in the month. The landowner asked them not to drill there showed them the debri from previous floods against the trees. Of course these CSG companies know more than any local landowner.
Brian & JD, the Morning Bulletin did some research on this during the last floods – from what I remember, there was a significant amount of nasty stuff pumped into the river by the local mining companies. However, any criticism of these fine corporate citizens is suppressed pretty quickly ’round these parts.
Assuming that the allowable level of contaminants pumped is relative to the amount of water flowing, what exactly is the problem with increasing outflows when there’s loads of water to dilute them?
FDB there isn’t any if it happens that way.
I remain agnostic about what happened in CQ in 2008.
I believe there was a problem in NW Qld in 2009. The floods there were extraordinary.
I accept what still@downfall says about the Surat Basin as a no bullsh*t straight shooter.
Scary stuff still@downfall
This picture from the 2009 wet shows a creek bed dried out after contamination. FDB, this stuff can’t be good
http://qcl.farmonline.com.au/news/state/agribusiness-and-general/general/mt-isa-mine-discharge-pollutes-creek/1460288.aspx
Edit: And it was Brian’s posts in 2009 that had showed that picture I linked to above.
(BTW, your posts Brian are always very informative and a great read – ty again)
The mine pumping is not a beat up. You can find the report of the 2008 Ensham Mine at http://www.fitzroyriver.qld.gov.au/ if you’re interested. Dept of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) put out a press release just prior to Christmas on its plans to manage mine releases during the flood events.
There are over 30 mines in the Fitzroy Basin, a small (but increasing) number of CSG fields and at least one other enterprise with tailing dams of unknown but dubious quality.
A large flood does mean that releases, deliberate or accidental, will be diluted. But that is hardly an excuse for poor on-site waste management and containments. Plus there are cumulative impacts when there so many operators in a single basin.
There is also the possibility that releases may continue into a rapidly dropping water levels. Plus the fact that at least one of the rivers in the Fitzroy has been known to flow backwards in certain flood conditions.
Disclosure: I work for the Qld Govt (but not DERM). I can only comment on stuff that is on the public record.
Tony @ 23, I recognise your gravatar and accept that your comment is made in good faith. The comment I quoted @ 22 was also from an established commenter not given to frivolity and from memory quoted data.
Polyquats @ 30, it does seem, then, that something untoward happened in 2008. The effects could nevertheless have been exaggerated in the media, I don’t know.
On urban myths, there is one circulating, apparently, that the Paradise Dam wall in the Burnett catchment has a crack in it, which I understand to be entirely false.
Last evening on ABC radio I heard a weatherman say the the current La Nina is the strongest since 1973, is set to continue for the next few months. The expected effects extend to warmer summer weather in SE Australia.
There’s been a comment by a Hanriette Ruigt of Holland as follows:
This comment is so far detached from likely reality that one has to wonder. But just in case, here’s something of an answer.
My wife’s sister and her husband live in Tamborine Mountain. There’s been no trouble with the phones and no flooding. Eagle Heights is a suburb of Tamborine mountain. If all the ice sheets in the world melted Eagle Heights would still be high and dry by a considerable margin.
Does anybody know if donations of clothing are being accepted? With their shops under water, money from the governmnet seems useless for their immediate situation.
At a rough estimate off the BOM Qld river catchment map the flooded catchments are about 500,000 sq km, well short of the 900,000 sq km for France and Germany combined as has been reported. And not all of a catchment would be under water either. And why not give the area in terms of actual sq kms anyway?
I read in the book “Running Down” (about Australian rivers)that the Dawson river valley has been extensively cleared and shaped for broad scale agriculture, with weirs and dams accumulating large silt loads. I wonder what effect this has had on the level of flooding?
Not to downplay the terrible problems of the flooding by any means, but I am reading this line of comments from San Francisco and wondering where all these intelligent and civilized comments are coming from. If this was in the US on Yahoo, there would be 300 comments and most would be arguing with each other, calling names and misspelling every third work.
Nice sense of community and balance of science and opinion, too. I’m impressed, again, with Australia and Australians.
Very tactful Brian. I believe the words “Mountain” and “Heights” should have been enough.
Although it’s possible that people are being evacuated in Eagle Heights. If they’ve got some serious bowel prolems, e.g.
Four mining companies including MMG Century, responsible for that green slurry in the picture linked above, were charged and fined for illegal discharges of toxic waste during the 2009 wet. Not a beatup at all.
Jenny @ 34, I don’t know.
Robert @ 35 said:
There is a lot of brigalow country in the Dawson valley, much of which has been cleared. These days I think beef and grazing would predominate over cultivation.
My father took up a block of virgin country, mostly in the upper Dawson catchment in 1921. He said the creek often ran for six weeks and was clear. When I was young it ran for a few days and was muddy.
The dams would have been long full and wouldn’t have had an effect.
Michael Kelly @ 36, our commenters are invariably civilised and intelligent but I think we who run the blog do have to take some of the credit. We have a comments policy which calls for civilised discourse. We can’t insist on intelligence, but experience shows that intelligent commenters stay if we provide the right environment.
su @ 38, 2009 was definitely not a beatup.
On the news tonight the death toll from the floods is up to 11, I gather mostly from people putting themselves in harm’s way.
Robert and Brian, does this mean that the ‘inquest’ on these floods is like to produce a report suggesting they are ‘man made’ – and we’ll have the denialists coming out in force?
Here is a satellite photo of how much water is flowing through Qld.
By the way
has John Howard come forward to appologise for his beligerant environmental inaction over those vital last chance 11 years when had he been a true leader and acted in the best interests of Australia rather than his dogma these floods may well have been far less severe.
Having seen Tony Abbott reviewing the scene from a helicopter saying it is importnat to “hold the government to account” for the way that the flood is handled. It is far more important to hold Tony Abbott to account for his part in eliminating our last chance to establish any sort of carbon release retardation action.
Lets be absolutely clear as these tradgedies become worse and more frequent There is responsibility to be taken, and culprits to be blamed, and shame to be assigned.
Lets start the list of Australia’s environmental criminals
John Howard
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Tony Abbott
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Andrew Bolt
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Please fill in the blanks with the names of environmental beligerants that you are aware of.
There is a lot of room in between there for the faceless buerocrats and lobbyists who have intentionally blocked and frustrated environmental action for personal interest.
Make no mistake as your insurance rates escalate, your food prices climb, your property is damaged, your job becomes unstable, your children become fearful for their future, that all of these losses can be sheeted home to the intentional failures of these people who chose to ignore the desperate urgings of the world’s scientific body, declaring in the so doing that they “knew better”.
Brian @ 41,
The Head Honcho of Qld. emergency services was downplaying the number of deaths on ABC TV 2, this morning. His argument was that at this time of year these kinds of drownings occur in Qld anyway, due to the Big Wet/CXyclones, etc. Even more odd was the weird story of Anna Bligh declaring on the Qld. 7.30 Report that Rockhampton was completely cut off when both emergency workers and the press were reporting this morning it had not been cut off from the north as yet.
And, perhaps most disturbing, was the story on ABC TV that the commercial stations down south are simply not reporting in any depth on the Queensland floods, because its not as dramatic as, say, bushfires. Since I don’t watch commercial TV much, and certainly not recently,I can’t verify the accuracy of that charge. But if its true, then once again our media are not doing their job.
Paul B @ 45, I think the access problem to Rockhampton is quite complex. The airport runway is definitely under and they have sandbagged the control tower so that they can still get helicopters in and out.
There’s been talk of bringing food in by barge from Gladstone, so rail and road must be substantively impaired from the south. I did hear that there was road access from the south, but only to locals. But there are stories of huge potholes and places, especially out west, where the bitumen has simply been lifted off the road.
My brother last week was traversing a local Brisbane road which he heard on the radio was closed, when it manifestly wasn’t. So I think there is a fair bit of confusion around.
Thanks, Brian.
I also heard a who;e bunch of people went by ferry down to Gladstone, yesterday, I think.
The Elders weather site forecasts increased rain for the first 4 months of this year in both Queensland and northern/central NSW. As I mention on my blog, summer rain has now increased over these areas as all weather systems in the southern hemisphere have moved southwards. This is a long term change that started around 1971 and is likely to remain for a while. Unfortunately if true, this would suggest that summer flooding will occur again. Even if the risk of my being correct is small the consequences are devastating, so risk mitigation theory suggests some action. I suggest detailed study of recent weather patterns, and if necessary a think tank to plan government strategy for the future.
Climate Progress has a neat post on the floods with some good pics.
From Kevin Trenberth:
I second Michael Kelly’s comments, about how refreshing it is to read these balanced and reasoned posts. I grew up in Mackay and went to boarding school in Rockhampton, and have been looking all over the web for coverage of the floods, and this is by far the best I’ve seen. From Seattle, kudos to Larvatus Prodeo and thank you!
Thanks for the satellite photo Katz@43. Instead of misleading statements like “an area the size of NSW/France/France and Germany/France and Poland is under water”, as I have seen in the media so far, the satellite photo says it much more clearly. The rivers spread out maybe 50 km at their widest and the vast majority of the land is not under water, although it may be pretty wet and cut off. From satellite photos I saw of the Indus floods in Pakistan the area of the valley affected in Pakistan could have been much bigger. Still, it is an enormous flood and will be devastating to many. If Trenberth is correct (@49) these floods are likely to be more frequent. An article in the SMH today argues for new houses in these areas to be built on stilts- hard to argue with.
A state government document I came across while checking for adjustments to Q100 levels in view of AGW Increasing Queensland’s resilience
to inland ?ooding in a changing
climate:
Interesting key recommendations
Apologise for HTML formating above, why has LP not a comment preview?
Robert @ 51, I don’t think anyone ever said that there was an area as big as France and Germany under water, but I stand to be corrected. If you said there was unusual rainfall over an area the size on France and Germany it would, I think, be somewhere near the mark.
Without being critical, Katz’ satellite photo didn’t show the Burnett basin in Wide Bay, or the Condamine-Balonne at all.
Google up Aramac. One of the last deaths was someone whose car got swept off a crossing at Aramac.
St George down near the NSW border is facing 80% inundation from the Balonne with the river heights slightly above what they had in March.
In the next few days a new rain influence is moving through – over the Darling Downs and Maranoa (Condamine-Balonne), SEQ and then up to Wide Bay and Capricornia (Rockhampton). The forecasts are for “heavy” rain in parts.
River heights are peaking in Rockhampton about now. They expect the peak to last for 36 hours and “major flooding” to last another 7 days.
My wife spoke to my brother who lives in Gracemere, just west of Rockhampton last night. Local people have been driving down to Gladstone, but not across town. The road is open to the north.
They have one property NW of Rockhampton on the Mackenzie River. There they have 1000 head of cattle on an island of about 1500 acres and getting smaller. That’s a concern, but otherwise reasonably OK.
Brian, the news services made the Germany/France area comparison.
BilB, my memory is that the Germany/France thing started with Anna Bligh who said that the area affected was Fr and Ger.
Which was possibly over-cooking it a bit.
BTW it’s raining in a band from Central Qld down to Port Macquarie.
My nephew and his family were planning to go from Brisbane back to Emerald via Barcaldine. (Their place was high and dry in Emerald.) That’s 1,380km. If you head south from here that distance will take you to about Albury.
From Kiel in Northern Germany to Genoa in Italy it’s 1,345km.
I’m not all that uncomfortable with the France/Germany comparison.
On second thoughts, France or Germany would have been better.
The Bureau has just published a special climate statement on the floods (and the rainfall leading up to them) – at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/special-statements.shtml.
Thanks, Blair. I’ve added this as an update at the end of the post and uploaded Figure 5 Flood peaks in eastern Australia over the period 26 November 2010 – 7 January 2011.
The direct link to the statement is here (useful when the post recedes into the archives).
There are lots of rainfall records broken.
The ABC are still giving us 15 mins of reporting of the floods on the evening TV news and about the same on the 7.30 report.
On the radio they are still saying that the area under water in Qld is equivalent to France and Germany. For the record France and Germany have a combined area of 906,400sq km. Qld’s is 1,852,600. NSW BTW is 809,400.
It’s stretching it to say that half of Qld has been seriously affected by flooding. For example, in SEQ there has been flash flooding, but no serious inconvenience lasting any amount of time.
To say that half of Qld is under water is, I’d suggest, fatuous.
Maybe they’re counting territorial waters?
Apparently, months after the news focus on Pakistan’s devastating flooding has ebbed, the inundation has not. Significant parts of the country’s most fertile land remain under 10 feet of water and 200,000 people remain in various refugee camps.
The torrents of water have disturbed unexploded ordinance and randomised it over the flood plain, just for extra fun.
Fran, I’d be very grateful if you could provide a link regarding the current situation following the Pakistan floods.
This are two links I’ve found useful GregM:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/01/pakistan-flooding.html
http://www.pakresponse.info/
This is dreadful. My sympathy to everyone touched by the floods in Queensland, and NSW, and WA.
Actually, you don’t think of Toowoomba as a place subject to flooding. But:
Myall Creek in Dalby is up again higher than last time. Gympie went under a few days ago. I heard they had a dump of 330mm in Maleny yesterday, which is where the Mary River starts, so more trouble there.
Here’s a map of affected towns, except some of them are sizable cities.
More flash flooding in the Lockyer Valley, where a lot of our vegetables (used to) come from.
I heard today that the Somerset Dam was 150% full and Wivenhoe 140%, with flooding in the Brisbane river above and below the dam wall. If a cyclone rolled in now it would be on for young and old.
Anna Bligh had her plane struck by lightning over Maleny either last night or the night before, I forget which.
Right here we’ve had about 250mm in the last few days, which comparatively is probably light on.
There’s a photo gallery here.
Scores are missing in flash floods.
To the people on this blog who are in the direct line of the coming floods in Brisbane, and who have been hit already by the floods up in Qld, my prayers are with you all. I am very very sorry to see the devastation. I am so shocked it happened so quickly.
Im watching a seven news chopper who caught in their vision of the floods, a car with people in it and could do nothing about it as they are not a rescue crew. By the time the managed to pick a rescue expert, the car was gone. Agonising. I am so sorry.
What Casey said. The flood damage before yesterday, while heartbreaking, seemed somehow not too abnormal. Horrible, but something I could kinda relate to. The flash flooding really shocked me. Those poor people.
Take care of yourselves, everybody in those flood zones.
Eight confirmed dead and 72 missing according to a police report.
They believe there will be no more deaths reported in Toowoomba, but the focus is on an area below the range – Murphy’s Creek, Withcott, Grantham, Helidon etc. One eye-witness report said 7 houses had been washed away in Grantham.
It seems that there was what we used to call a “cloud burst” on the lip of the range at Toowoomba, sending a wall of water down the main street and another down the range into the Lockyer Valley.
Communications are down, mobile coverage patchy. They had choppers in there this morning but then the weather closed in.
I can only reiterate what others have said. This is shocking. My deepest sympathies to all Queenslanders caught in this national catasstrophe, but especially those on LP. Hope you are, at the least, all safe.
There are reports of potential flashfloods in the Northern Tablelands, but only a generalised warning, no specific places, so so far all LP-ers in this district are probably okay. Not sure about Tamworth though. They usually cop it pretty bad even in normal years, though I hasten to add I have seen no reports. Will let you know if there are any developments.
Problems about flooding in Brisbane. A lot of local roads closed. Flooding possible in 33 suburbs. The metrics are roughly this.
There is more water in the system now than there was in 1974. The Wivenhoe dam, built since then, has about 1.45 million ML of flood storage over and above the normal water supply. Sydney Harbour is 500,000 ML, so that’s close to 3 sydharbs. This is filling rapidly as we are getting about 2 sydharbs a day of new water into the catchment. They are releasing about 240,000 ML a day down the river. This is producing river levels of about 3 metres above the normal. We are running into a period of high king tides, with a 2.6 metre tide expected on Friday.
Hope I got all that right.
Water from the Lockyer Valley comes into the Bremer River which enters the Brisbane River below the Wivehoe. Flooding is expected in Ipswich today.
Mercifully the weather system seems to be weakening and drifting to the SW. Rain predicted today, then showers tomorrow and from then on. So in terms of a major disaster in Brisbane it could be a near thing. I think I heard that the upper limit is 7,500 properties affected, which is bad enough.
A quick dispatch from the Granite Belt which, being at the top of the Great Dividing Range like Toowoomba, is not a place one normally associates with flooding.
Stanthorpe is flooding, and they’re evacuating houses along the creek. Disturbingly, the SES is talking about farm dams bursting, not to mention Storm King Dam.
Our little village is a bit further south, and a little higher, so we’re quite safe – but we’re isolated north and south and it’s still pissing down. Numerous trucks, caravans etc have created a couple of unofficial caravan parks by being forced to sit it out here for the last couple of days.
I have the dubious honour of being the official recorder for BOM of our town’s rainfall, so I have to don the wet weather gear shortly and go out and read the rain gauge… should be interesting.
Today was supposed to be the day the kids and I were to head down to the coast for a few days…
I’ve opened up a fresh thread.