Power was cut to Brisbane homes for safety reasons on Wednesday, and residents were ordered to higher ground as Australia’s third-biggest city braced for its worst soaking in living memory.
In Ipswich, 30 kilometres to the south-west and with a population of 140,000, a third of the city was underwater as the flood advanced on Queensland’s state capital.
“There are 19,700 residential properties across Brisbane where there’s projected to be flooding across the whole block of land,” Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman said. “There are a further 3,500 commercial premises across the city that will see flooding across the entire block of land as well.” Thousands were in evacuation shelters ahead of Thursday’s expected flood crest, which was set to top the peak of catastrophic 1974 flooding of 5.45 metres.
“It’s a frightening time,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said, “but if we’re all calm, if we all stick together, ... we’ll prevail in this event.” Supermarket shelves have been stripped of groceries by frantic shoppers. Householders exasperated by long queues to get sandbags have improvised with plastic bags filled with newspapers serving as fortification against waters that in Ipswich rose at a rate of 1 metre an hour early Wednesday.
A woman due to deliver her second baby this month was sheltering with 4-year-old son Liam in the Ipswich shelter. Identifying herself only as Amy, she said her home was most likely awash.
Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale said the tide of human misery was hard to take. “The water’s rising and it’s swallowing up your city — it makes it very hard,” he said. “But ... these are only floodwaters and the most important thing is our safety, and I want to make sure no other lives are lost.”
Queensland’s floods have been a month-long moving disaster with 10 confirmed deaths and more than 90 people unaccounted for as successive towns have been hit by floodwaters racing through the north-east state to the Pacific Ocean.
Two-thirds of the state — and area bigger than France and Germany combined — is flooded, industry is at a standstill and agriculture beset by lost harvests. The repair bill has been put at 5 billion Australian dollars ($4.9 billion) and lost production at 9 billion Australian dollars.
“This is a very grim situation, and Queensland is going to need us to stand shoulder to shoulder with Queenslanders over months and months and months of recovery,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard said.
Newman urged residents to stay at home because most commercial life had ceased, the power was off, public transport was crippled and the overburdened phone network was on the blink.
“It’s about whether your job’s going to be vital to keeping the wheels of this city turning,” he said. “If you’re doing something that means the supermarket shelves are stacked or the petrol stations get supplied with fuel, please, we need you.”
People spoke of their amazement at the debris — trees, pontoons, yachts, motor boats, a catamaran — being sluiced down the swollen Brisbane River. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Charlie Gibbs said. “I’m pretty worried someone’s going to end up being killed by it all.”
Brisbane’s first casualty was a 4-year-old boy who was washed from a rescue boat into the torrent.
