The Queensland Flood – 2

Gladys We sends along a link to a remarkable set of before-and-after shots of the floods in Brisbane posted by ABC News, Australia’s broadcaster.  These aerials were taken in flyovers on January 13 and January 14 – and then matched up exactly.  When loaded, you can use your mouse to hover over each photo, and move the line back and forth to view the devastation caused by flooding.

As Gladys says: “Wow.  Just wow.”

Or if you want to explore the flooding in Brisbane in more detail, go to Nearmap.com, which has posted a complete layer of aerial images of Brisbane taken on the 13th when the flood was near its peak – better quality than Google Maps, actually, but with all the features.

Friends are writing in with observations on the Queensland Flood, and what it might mean:

Here’s Greg Vann, Director of Buckley Vann, Town Planning consultants in Brisbane:

House was high and dry, no power outages, office unscathed, so we are in the lucky group. I’d say that statistically only a small proportion of the city population suffered direct impacts, but that is still a big number and for many it is a real tragedy.

As to the implications, it’s hard to say yet. I was here for the 1974 floods, which were a metre higher; and helped out volunteering yesterday so that was the first time I saw first hand some of the harder hit areas. It just felt like 74 again…Tragedy certainly, but not as big a deal as one might think from the media coverage.

As for the CBD, Southbank, Coronation Drive etc I really think it’ll be taken on the chin as something that happens every few decades and we just learn each time how to do it better

The big issue for me is whether it changes our perception/relationship to the river, having called ourselves the river city for years. Hard to say where that’ll end up yet

The other thing that might well end up having a long term impact is the volunteering. It has been truly amazing  – tens of thousands of people giving their time and effort to help out people they don’t know. While you are working, others are just coming around, offering food, setting up sausage sizzles on street corners, offering technical skills (tradesman etc, often from the Gold or Sunshine Coasts). It was often to the point where there were too many people and not enough to do; and causing traffic problems in affected areas!

Maybe this might be another Expo 88 or Commonwealth Games, where the city comes of age in another way – finally taking itself seriously as a caring, inclusive community. One can only hope!

There will be some short term economic impacts by loss of income for business, but in some respects it might end up being another type of “stimulus package” with all the repair and rebuilding work required; and once the mines get back into operation, they’ll maybe be selling into a market with high prices because of the lack of supply. That will be interesting.

Warren Rowe, Director of Planning, Environment and Transport at Gold Coast City Council:

Our place was in fact high and dry but my sister’s home only 1.2k’s away received about 600mm of water through the 2nd level of their three-storey house. Her street was one of literally hundreds in Brisbane/Ipswich that was affected. It is a sobering experience to see an entire street lined both sides with the contents of houses representing a lifetime of hard work. And the smell… I was in Brisbane in the 1974 flood and you never forget the smell.

The bright side is that it has brought the city together like nothing I’ve seen before. The stories of generosity and selfless acts do quite literally bring a tear to your ( mine) eye.

Maybe that will be the legacy of the 2011 flood.

Jarrett Walker (humantransit.org) – who’s a little reluctant to draw too many conclusions about climate change yet:

One big difference is that year-to-year variation in weather is always much more extreme in Australia than on your coast.  It’s a function of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, which delivers years of drought alternating with years of flood.  Temperatures fluctuate more wildly, too.  And most of the interior of Australia is basically an enormous floodplain, a desert except when it’s underwater. 

The sad thing about the Brisbane floods is that it was mostly the poor who lived in very low-lying areas, often without insurance.  Obviously the flood risk drove down housing costs there, and it was tempting to believe you could live out your life in one of those beautiful old houses and just be lucky.  It is a lucky country, after all, in the years when it isn’t trying to kill you. 

There’s a lot more rage up in Toowoomba, which got a flash flood utterly without warning.  One minute people were chatting outside a cafe, and the next minute they were being swept along with their cars in a torrent of water.  Agonizing fatalities and amazing rescues etc.  I was surprised this morning to see the conservative Australian run a front-of-opinion-section piece basically blaming the local government for approving too much development that constrained the natural floodplains of the creeks involved.

I don’t know what the floods are going to do politically.  All sides of politics are flailing.  Greens leader Bob Brown is blaming the coalminers.  The Labor Right is demanding more levees along the Brisbane River, as though nobody’s learned from the US Army Corps of Engineers’ mishaps on the Mississippi.  Someone will figure out how to blame the Chinese soon.

This year has been amazingly wet all over eastern Australia.  You can barely see the sheep in the metre-high grass.   And up in the tropics, the wet season is only beginning.