Australia: ten dead as Brisbane faces flood

Parts of Australia‘s third largest city, Brisbane, have been evacuated as flood waters, which have been sweeping through Queensland in recent weeks, race eastward.

A surging 26ft wall of water swept through the city of Toowoomba, southeast Queensland, carrying cars, people and debris with it. The surge soon moved through the town, which has a population of 90,000, and on to smaller communities in the region.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard warned that more deaths were expected.

“The nation needs to brace itself for the fact that the death toll as a result of yesterday’s flash flooding and walls of water is likely to rise,” she said in a televised address.

Families swept away

Tammy Wilson, a Toowoomba resident, is currently in Brisbane and told Channel 4 News that the atmosphere in some parts of the city was “eerily quiet”.

“In other parts, friends are reporting to me that it’s gridlock traffic. Everyone is concerned about their family and trying to get home.”

Her husband, Patrick, has been protecting their home since the floods peaked over the last 24 hours.

“We live 2,000 feet above sea level, so it’s not something you would expect. Whole houses are being swept away with families in them. All you see is concrete slabs left.”

He has shielded their home by building a mini floor barricade using sand bags and gravel from recent renovations. “It slowed the water down, but there are many houses here that couldn’t survive the force of the water.

“There’s been a real feeling of desperation and devastation over the last 24 hours.”

Floods threaten Brisbane

Severe flood waters are now expected to hit Brisbane and early estimated suggest more than 9,000 homes could be inundated.

Police have urged residents in low-lying areas of the riverside city to move to higher ground.

The Brisbane River, which runs through the city, is expected to reach major flood levels in the next 48 hours, Australia’s official weather bureau said in its latest forecast.

Queensland has seen more than a month of rain – the state’s worst flooding for decades. 200,000 people are estimated to have been affected by the floods.

State officials have so far put the cost of the disaster at about $5bn (£3.1bn).

Super storm hits Australia caused by 'La Nina'
It did not require complex climatic modelling to predict the "super storm" which unleashed Queensland's inland killer-tsunami, writes Jonathan Miller. Meteorologists and oceanographers did, to some degree, see it coming, warning that after weeks of waterlogging, further deluge could spell disaster.

They blame La Nina, "the Girl Child" - counterpart to the El Nino - a phenomenon which sees a cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, leading to weather turmoil across the globe. 

This year, La Nina's the strongest on record; she has become a meteorological Frankenstein, responsible for torrential rain as far afield as Australia, South East Asia, Pakistan, Venezuela and Colombia and vicious cold snaps in North America.

With suburban Brisbane, Australia's third-largest city, now braced for inundation within the next 48 hours, Queensland's "Long Dry" – a decade of drought – has been dramatically reversed. It is now being dubbed "The Big Wet".

Today the Mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman, was quoted as saying that "the situation has demonstrably deteriorated."

Read more from Jonathan Miller on the Australia floods