Small Mercies
There are so many ways that this set of floods could be even worse:
- The rain stopped on Tuesday night. If it had kept raining in the catchment and down in the city, the water would have been higher and faster, and rescue crews would have had a much more difficult time. The sunshine has been very, very welcome.
- It's early January. This is the quietest time of year for many businesses and industries, and many people were already with their families rather than travelling for business.
- It's school holidays. There were no groups of children isolated in classrooms, or swept away by the tsunami in the western hills.
- It's warm. Hypothermia is always possible, of course, but nothing like for the people isolated and made homeless by the snowstorms in the US.
- We have well trained emergency personnel (who have had a lot of recent practice with flooding...) and disaster management plans at all levels from private businesses to the state and federal levels. Without them, there could have been chaos.
- We have the technology to detect and track rainstorms, and to model water flows in catchments and rivers. This meant that information was available far enough in advance of most of the flooding (through tragically, not for Toowoomba) that most people were able to self-evacuate in time.
- We have a culture that emphasises helping out in the community, which has resulted in there being so many people trying to volunteer to help out that there wasn't work for all of them to do. Volunteers were being turned away from the evacuation centres and sandbagging depots last night for lack of work, and the Volunteering Queensland website keeps going down under the weight of people trying to register to help with the cleanup.