flood water
Water in the river, the day of the flood peak...taken by my friend.
You can see all the top soil in it from the Lockyer Valley, which is the food bowl of Brisbane. They should really collect all the silt for gardening instead of washing it down the drains. NOT nice to have this kind of water through your home though. Leaves behind inches of stinking mud caking everything.
They think they will never find the people still missing in the Lockyer, which is a horrifying thought. They have been obliterated basically. It's hugely emotional and tragic what happened up there. Here it's more a huge material loss. Some people who can recover easily and many who can not. All of them have lost whole lives worth of possessions and all the the work it took to acquire and maintain them.
It is a hugely shocking event, but when you look at history it's hard to see why this kind of thing wasn't expected and planned for. In 1893 they had three such floods in one season, and much bigger too...up to 9 metres. Many houses were washed down into the bay. This can and will happen again, and it might even happen this season. In those circumstances would you want to clean up and rebuild? I don't know. There's really nowhere in this country that isn't vulnerable to either fire or flood or both. Not to mention freak storm cells. It really does make you think carefully about how and where to establish your life. I have decided I must try and digitize and upload as much of the art work in this house as I can. Losing all that stuff would be a thousand time worse than losing anything you can buy in a shop. In fact, apart from the animals it is the only thing I would try to save.