On Tuesday 11th of January 2011 we hear from our neighbours that parts of Yeronga are being evacuated due to expected flooding of the Brisbane River. It had been raining non-stop for weeks and weeks. We decided to start to move all the valuable stuff from the ground floor to the first floor and perhaps evacuate ourselves.

We managed to move most stuff upstairs...even the Piano movers made it in time - before the roads were to cut off to everyone. (That saved the insurance company $5K alone!)

We came back on Wednesday morning to grab a few more things from the house. Driving back to the house, we turned down a road that we have done for the past 15 years - only this time - it is completely full of water and so were all the houses around it. This is when it really hits you - this is a real flood.

We make it to our house (via a back road) and when we get there we see the water has made it up to the steps of the ground floor deck. This is now scary and you want to leave quickly. We grab a few more things from the house and make a run for it. We get back to our friends place and the wife wants more stuff retrieved from the house. We venture back - about an hour has passed now - and we now see the water about 30cm up into the ground floor. It’s all over now.

We spend the next nights at friends homes watching the TV and praying for the best outcome. When they keep saying that the flood will break the 1974 flood level - then we know we have lost everything as 1974 was just at our first floor level.

Thursday comes and we wait. I get a call from my neighbour in the afternoon to come on back and see the damage. The water had drained significantly over the past 12 hours and the roads were just passable (even in my little Mazda).

Arriving at the house, we find the water had reached about 1.25m inside the ground floor and over 2.2m outside in the yard. The mess and smell was unbelievable.

We spend the next few days cleaning and cleaning and removing rubbish. The atmosphere in the streets is something never experienced. People everywhere lending a hand....fresh water...and BBQ across the park...some guys with 40 pizzas in their boot handing them out to anyone...

In the end, we were one of the lucky ones. Further down our street and behind us was complete devastation. Both floors of many homes inundated. The streets of Fairfield are like a war zone. Mud everywhere. Army people everywhere. Still today, some of these streets are completely abandoned.

In the end, many questions will be asked. The biggest of course was of if this could have been avoided. The mythical Wivenhoe Dam was supposed to stop us from these floods (built after the big 1974 flood). But in the ensuing decades, the Dam went from Flood Mitigation to include Water Reservoir - two objectives that are in complete diametric opposition. On the night of flood, Wivenhoe Dam was at 190% capacity (Dams are built to hold twice their official “capacity”). How it got to this point after weeks of rain is disturbing. The BOM had predicted - and we did have weeks and weeks of - non-stop rain. The Dam should have been slowly emptied over those weeks. Instead it was all released over these nights (plus a king tide) to produce the Brisbane 2011 Floods.

Please visit the Flood 2011 Photo Album for some images of the flood impact.