THE rain stopped but the water kept coming all day. Three rivers emptied the hills behind Brisbane. The Bremer swamped Ipswich. The Lockyer tore through its valley, killing at least 10 people on the way. The upper Brisbane cascaded from the Wivenhoe Dam. And all that water was heading for Brisbane.
In the face of this catastrophe, old records don't mean much any more. ''People talk about the floods of 1974 but they are history now,'' said the mayor of Ipswich, Paul Pisasale, as he surveyed his underwater town. ''Now we'll be talking about the floods of 2011.''
Brave and terrible stories are coming out of the hills, stories of lucky escapes and awful deaths. Trapped on a roof in Grantham, Martin Warburton watched bodies float by. He thought at first they were trying to swim. ''You bend down to try and grab them,'' he told Channel Seven, ''And then you realise that they are already gone.''
While police were picking through the wreckage upstream, emergency workers began preparing for the devastation yet to come in Brisbane. All day, authorities were urging people to get out and get out soon. For a long time, not much attention was paid.
Crowds gathered on the banks of the river. The wreckage drifting by was light entertainment. As the floating restaurant called Drift met its end under the Goodwill Bridge, there were cheers from vantage points. But what drew that crowd and held its attention all afternoon was the awesome power of the river itself.
By the time it hit its first peak of 4.4 metres in the middle of the afternoon, the Brisbane CBD was shut down, buses were off the roads, supermarket shelves were empty and water had entered 35 suburbs. But this was only a rehearsal for what was coming in the middle of the night when the flood would rise another metre.
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