Australia floods: waters rising in deserted Brisbane
Jonathan Miller blogs from Brisbane, where the waters continue to rise and the city braces itself to “wake up to a scene of widespread disaster”.
There’s something surreal about standing at the top of a riverside condominium in a rich, first world country, watching a natural disaster unfold 20 floors below. The river that dissects Australia’s third largest city is a swollen, churning torrent of angry coffee-coloured floodwater and within a few hours it will have inundated more than 50 Brisbane suburbs.
This is not Pakistan, where 10 million were displaced by raging floodwaters last summer – and more than 2,000 killed. As few as 12 have so far been confirmed killed in Queensland’s superflood. But while this may not be a humanitarian disaster, the scale of the flooding is unprecedented, with vast swathes of the state under water. Three quarters of it has been declared a disaster zone.
In the riverine capital of Australia’s “Sunshine State” – home to 2-million people – 20,000 homes have now been engulfed by the floodwater, which is predicted to carry on rising until 4am local time Tuesday (6pm GMT Monday). Thousands have fled to evacuation centres; there’s been panic-buying of water, milk, bread and fuel.
The Mayor of Brisbane has talked today of his sense of horror at the sheer power of the river; and the Australian Prime Minister has echoed his sentiments, talking of her profound shock. The Queensland Premier, Anna Blight said: “Brisbane residents should expect to wake up of a scene of widespread disaster. We will wake to an image of Brisbane that will shock many of us.”
Tonight I met the Executive Director of Queensland’s Red Cross in a big evacuation centre. Greg Goebel told me he usually spent his time figuring out how to deploy his teams of volunteers to disaster zones elsewhere – he actually cited Pakistan as an an example.
“We never actually thought we’d have to mobilise in our own back yard,” he told me.
“What this shows is that no continent is immune from disasters and one thing about disasters is that they are surprising. We thought there was just going to be a big flood in Queensland, now it has acutally turned into a catastrophe,” he said.
Mr Goebel added that with 80 per cent of Australians living next to the coast, there was a dawning urgency that the country needed to work out what to do to adapt to increasingly unpredicable weather conditions – that have caused severe droughts, followed by heatwaves and bushfires, then deluge.
“This is a wakeup call for people, that we are in for wild weather, maybe due to climate change and a whole range of things. We have to start thinking about the land form and the built form that we have in this country,” he said.
Late this afternoon we drove through the eerily quiet Central Business District. It’s a ghost town, with police cars and cordons blocking off the usually busy roads leading down to and alongside the Brisbane River. It’s now midnight local time. I’ve just looked out of my window, where I get an amazing panorama of the river. There’s not a soul to be seen. The water continues to rise inexorably.
