Flood cleanup has begun in affected parts of Queensland – but power won’t be returned to thousands of Brisbane homes until the weekend.
All police emergency warnings for the region have been cancelled as the rain caused by ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred has eased.
Teams of volunteers from the Queensland Greens have helped clean up Dylan Gatt’s rental home, in Woolloongabba’s Churchill Street.
Many homes in the Brisbane suburb had lower levels inundated from flash flooding from Norman Creek. Gatt and his two housemates evacuated the house as water reached dangerous height.
“This is the third time it’s flooded since we’ve been here, which is only six months,” he said.
Gatt said they don’t feel safe in the home, but have few options if they chose to leave because the rental market is so tight.
“We don’t feel particularly safe here, we don’t feel safe and we don’t feel comfortable. We feel very on edge. Been a very on edge, week, year, month,” he said.
By Tuesday afternoon about 79,733 homes were still without power.
Energex is aiming to have some 95% of those dwellings restored by Friday. Power has been returned to all critical infrastructure, like water treatment plans and mobile phone towers, according to Essential Energy.
But thousands of homes and businesses in suburbs like Greenbank, Capalaba, Alexandra Hills and Currumbin Waters are not scheduled to get power back on Saturday night about 9pm. About 551 customers in Logan Village, south of Brisbane, won’t be reconnected until Sunday.
Local members of parliament representing Greenbank are concerned about elderly residents in the community.
“It’ll be over a week that these people haven’t had power,” Charis Mullen, the Labor MP for Jordan, said.
More than 330,000 homes have had power restored in what is “far the biggest electricity reconnection in Queensland we’ve ever had”, a spokesperson for Energex said.
Meanwhile, many residents of south-east Queensland are breathing a sigh of relief at evading a repeat of the 2022 flood, though parts of some suburbs have become inundated.
The city of Ipswich narrowly avoided severe flooding overnight, after the Bremer River peaked mere centimetres below the “major” flood level.
Parts of the Ipswich CBD and some suburbs had been inundated, and residents had been nervously watching the river height in the early hours of Tuesday. It peaked at 11.49m, just below the 11.7m major flood level.
The town of Laidley was inundated on Monday and the flood siren at Grantham – a legacy of the 2011 flooding that swallowed the town – was sounded, warning residents to leave.
Major flood warnings were in place for the Bremer River and Warrill Creek, and the Logan River south of Brisbane.
Generally the severity of rainfall brought by ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred was eased on Tuesday.
No major rain is forecast for Brisbane for the rest of the week.
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In Brisbane, flash flooding occurred in city creeks early on Monday, after the city recorded 275.2mm in the 24 hours to 9am, the largest single-day rainfall since the city’s 1974 floods.
Flooding occurred in similar places to the 2022 flood, but the creeks subsided through Monday morning and the impacts were ultimately not as severe as 2022.
‘Significant’ economic impact
A record 450,000 people in Queensland’s south-east have been affected by power outages since Thursday last week, which energy company Energex says is the state’s greatest outage cause by a natural disaster.
The premier, David Crisafulli, said the State Emergency Service had 3500 jobs in just 24 hours on Sunday – “the most ever recorded”.
He said recovery is going to be a “big effort” and the economic impact “significant”.
“We’ve got a state that’s got a lot of work to do,” he told ABC News Breakfast on Tuesday morning.
“We will make sure that we move from response to recovery, and we move there quickly. We have to make sure that every single person is given the opportunity to get life back to normal, and that work is certainly underway.”
Commonwealth personal hardship grants worth $180 for individuals, or $900 for families have been activated for Redlands, Gold Coast, Logan, Moreton Bay, as well as targeted areas in the Fraser Coast, adding to councils already covered.
The area was slowly returning to a sense of normality, with supermarkets, airports and select Brisbane bus services operating again while the Warrego Highway connecting Brisbane to Toowoomba was closed until further notice.
South of the border, residents have returned home as evacuation orders were lifted in some northern NSW towns.
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, warned evacuation centres for 700 people must shut once warnings were lifted as they were not meant to be a long-term fix
Some 1,800 people were isolated by flood waters in NSW on Monday and more than 10,000 people were under emergency warnings.