I’m blogging during our state of emergency, personally safe in a high and dry area of Brisbane, while some 40,000 properties in and around the CBD and riverside suburbs are flooding. Thousands of people are evacuating and businesses in the CBD have mostly closed for now.
Beyond Brisbane, lives as well as homes have been lost, and large swathes of towns have been devastated. Twelve people have died in the floodwaters, and dozens are missing. It is that water that is now swelling our river, cascading over its banks, closing many of our roads.
Thank you to so many of you who have emailed to ask how we are. We are fortunate, and our hearts and thoughts go out to those who have lost loved ones and homes.
Rowan, my daughter, is expecting the birth of her first baby any day, keeping her eye on the latest road closures affecting her journey to the hospital. Between the floods and the imminent birth, perhaps we can be excused totally overlooking, until an hour ago, the fact that we have a lot of furniture and personal items such as photos, books and mementos in storage in a high flood prone zone! It’s too late to do anything about this. All access roads are closed. I hope our stuff remains dry, but really, it’s just stuff. And so we flow.
Post script – 13 January
Amazingly and thankfully our ‘stuff’ remained dry. The overnight peak flood fell 1m short of the predicted level. We phoned the storage facility this morning, and they reported that the flood reached the building and would have entered (and all storage on our floor would have been deluged and damaged) if it had been 30cm higher. Our stuff was saved by the difference between the predicted and actual flooding levels. Two similar storage facilities close by (same franchise) were flooded. Meanwhile, Brisbane – and Queensland – begins damage assessment and recovery. Today the sun is shining.
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