Toowoomba Flood

gcvmom

Here we go again!
Maybe you've already seen this video... my mom sent it to me tonight. Amazing to watch the flash flood unfold before your eyes!

 

Marguerite

Active Member
It was pretty bad. More videos are coming out of this. I think this is possibly the one husband or I posted about a week ago. If it's not the same, it was taken at the same time from a nearby window.

They had the funeral on Wednesday for the little boy and his mother - the boy who said, "Take my little brother first, he can't swim." They were back within reach of the boy again, when the flood pulled him and his mother from the rescuers' grasp.

Of all the people lost in the Queensland floods, almost all were lost in this one torrent.

A year ago they had water rationing. Less than a year ago.

Marg
 

Marguerite

Active Member
OK, watched it in full. It's pretty much all the footage we saw, but it's been put together in more detail and in one lump. A very effective and accurate depiction of what happened. There is another piece of film not in this clip, taken from a second floor window as the water came up to the window sill and the people inside were telephoning their families to say goodbye. They played that one on the news a few days ago and interviewed the families. They were still badly traumatised.

We need to ring Centrelink (our welfare office) but the lines have been jammed for a fortnight, with people trying to get flood relief and emergency support. That will be with extra staff being put on to cope.

Marg
 

Marguerite

Active Member
It's been scorching hot here in Canberra but this afternoon storm clouds burst quite dramatically. SIL1 was out shopping, on his way home, when he said he drove into what seemed like a wall of water. One minute the road was dry, next minute he had the wipers on full. But the gutters were more interesting, he said - they were flowing fast, but with the cloudburst escalating, suddenly there was a torrent flowing along, he said he could see the wave surging in the gutter from the sudden extra flow. Nothing on the Toowoomba scale, but after having seen that footage, it was eerily familiar on a smaller scale.

What happened in Towoomba was the same, but on a larger scale - excess water flow from multiple sources (several creeks run into one) suddenly became a flood surge.

We talk about flash floods in Australia, my parents used to talk about them. Never camp in a dry creek bed, they said, because if the river is in flood upstream you might not know until too late, it can come down as a wall of water. It can rain upstream but not where you are, so there's no clue sometimes.

Over 20 have died in Lockyer Valley (the Toowoomba flood). Nine people are still missing but remains have been found, possibly human (that worries me - how mangled must the body be, for them to not be sure?) which, if human, will bring the death toll up by one more. But it will probably require DNA to work out who it is.

Of the 9 missing, they're not expecting to find any of them now except by pure luck.

Marg
 

Marguerite

Active Member
SIL1 was saying this morning, we've lost almost all the Aussie beetroot crop. A lot of food produce has been lost, so there will be fairly major flow-on for our economy. We escaped the worst of the GFC, but it seems we are heading for worse trouble economically and food-wise. We've been seeing it already - man goes are usually no more than $1 at this time of the year, but the cheapest I've seen since the Qld floods has been $9 each. Quantities are down, they're talking about importing fruit from China; quarantine are screaming blue murder, say it could permanently kill our food industry if any imported disease gets out. And the quarantine controls in Asia are not up to the standard we need for such a vulnerable ecosystem. ONly NZ is more vulnerable.

The people - they're getting back on with their lives. The roads north are choked with tradesmen and volunteers driving north to help clean up. easy child mentioned s friend of hers who is one of that number - her husband just left her, she is still young, her friends are looking for a p/t job for her for 6 months in Qld so she can earn enough to live on while she is volunteering.
My brother's family farm survived without getting washed out. My nephew is on the top of a hill anyway, but has friends who got very wet. My sister also has friends in trouble, but they themselves came through. I haven't checked how her crops managed in the wet, they could lose some of the produce.

The people - individually, there will be a lot of PTSD but I know there will be community-level counselling in place, similar to what was put in place for our community after the really bad fires when difficult child 3 was born. You see whole towns go down with PTSD - it will start in the next couple of months, I'm betting. I'm glad the Federal government is involved, backing up the Qld government. They will make sure the services are not only in place, but used. They'll link it in with our national medical health scheme, so GPs will be ordering people to the tdocs put in place.

Recovery is going to take a few years, but if you go back there in six months, you would see a beautiful place with little sign of the damage. Outwardly.

Thanks for caring about our corner of the world.

Marg
 
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