Thread: 2022 Floods

I sold the old man's house last April, he had a shed full of lathes and milling machines that I have since put into temporary storage until I have space for them.

I went to see the people who bought his house after Cabbage Tree Creek in Deagon broke its banks. They had a metre of water flowing through the shed, and I say flowing because I saw the videos and it was raging through there.

The old mans house was on stumps, just high enough so the new owners didn't go under. I was born in that house, and I have never seen anything like it in my lifetime. The old lady up the road said the same, and she was there for the 77 floods.

In some ways, I am glad the old man has passed, because he would have been devastated. That shed was his life.

interesting to hear first hand even of minor damage.
How you can recover most of that stuff.

Now we have at least 2 days of thunderstorms. Possibly another whole week of rain. Coz you know, what we really need right now is more rain.
So it turns out just leaving my timber there was the right move because now it's round two.

Now is the time to come together and help out your fellow man. However once we get through all this, there needs to be some hard questions as to why people were allowed to keep living in flood prone areas and why the billions gifted after the 2011 flood were not used to raise houses, which was what it was provided for.

For now through, I just want to offer my sympathy for any readers who had their workshops ruined. Everyone is quite rightly concerned about people, pets and homes and cars. Given the severity of those consequences, sheds and workshops are understandably not mentioned. So I figure let's spare a thought on here for people's workshops. Which of course tend to be under a house or somewhere quite vulnerable in a flood. As Pearo mentioned, it can be devastating for some people.

Remember the Brisbane floods of 2011(?) we have Austar and so was able to watch the "news" happening in real time. My wife and I spent a few days looking at the spectacle and commenting "OOh look at that,OOH no look at that". I remember feeling sorry for the folk in these areas and trying to "feel" what they would be going through

At that time we were in drought and the thought of flooding rain was just a dream. This drought went on for probably 10 years (not exaggerating)......in 2019 I got first hand knowledge of how to feel about water damage. We got a storm that delivered 75mm in less than an hour!. Now you will have to imagine this.....the steep hill opposite us picked up the rain and drained it into a table drain that filled and started to go over the tarred road over the 600mm pipe draining the table drain. This discharged water ran into the paddock of the neighbour and filled a "lagoon" next to the shed and you guessed it started to run through the shed. I was at home and was helpless to do anything but just look at the unfolding mess.

The water running through the shed was black and carried sheep and unwanted seeds of burrs and undisireable weeds from over the road. I wasn't very happy about it at all. I ended up digging a channel in the neighbours paddock to drain the "lagoon". The photos I have are not very clear because I was in the rain trying to take them. The evidence that was in the photos showed the paddocks both over the road and the neighbors had very little grass cover due to the drought. So, had we had some growth, the amount of water may have been slowed down and may be the shed would not have flooded. We have been here 40 years and NEVER had any flooding at all!

OK the clean up. At the height of the flood we had 50mm through the shed. Yes I should stop whinging as others have had metres through their houses and sheds. What I want to mention is how do you clean it up? I managed to move some things higher but there was quite a few pieces of pyneboard and MDF that had to be chucked. My timber slab collection had silt on the bottoms but otherwise unaffected. I thought that when it dried out I could just sweep up the black silt and all would be back to normal. I found sweeping with a straw broom was next to useless because the silt was so fine it didn't respond to being swept. What now.....pressure cleaner. Well that worked but it took a lot of time because I had to move everything that was on the floor. I think it took 3 days all up to "find" the concrete floor. Oh the shed has a foot print of 120 square metres. I had to deal with the bottoms of a few cupboards that were swollen by the water.

I think we were very lucky to only have been "inconvenienced" by the water. I don't know how others would cope with real devastation. My heart goes out to them.

I have just gone through the photos of the inconvenient shed flood.

The gremlins in the photo department have laid over the pics. Can some one clever turn them?

I suppose some people will not like this.


I was born in Home Hill before living in Sidinee for 30 years or so. When I moved to Brisbane one of the very first things I did was grab a topographic map and the flood history off the BOM website.


Documents in hand it took me about 2 minutes to figure out Wivenhoe would knock 1 - 1.5 meters off the top of the flood. It was painfully obvious.


If I had the authority I would have spilled it sooner lower and longer but it wouldn't have made that much difference. Over half the water that flows through Brisbane comes down the Bremer and Lockyer which both join the Brisbane down stream from Wivenhoe. None of that water is controlled at all.


The regularity of the brisbane flood over the last 180 years is terrifying. It is the most regular weather pattern I've ever seen. In a way it's a relief this flood came early. The last anomily was in the 1890's when there were 2 big ones about 3 years apart (memory isn't perfect).


We were isolated from last weekend until yesterday, or this morning. I am not exactly sure when the first road opened. My neighbours are wonderful. Everyone was checking in on each other and offering to share what we had. As usual no help from the government. Amusingly power stayed on until this morning when a storn took it out.

I never lived in a river town before I moved to Brisbane and I had no knowledge of the history. But flying over it, it did occur to me that rivers can burst their banks. When I searched around for a house to buy there was no readily available information to tell you if the lot of land was in a flood area. There were over 30 different searches you could do on a title and you had to pay for each one. I'm not Mr Riverside Millionaire. All those search costs were just not viable for me. No one ever told me of any other way to find out, even though it had occurred to me it was a possible risk. Our street is not next to a creek and so the flood search was one of many that had to be left to chance.

About 2 years later we had the 2011 floods and WHILE the floods were in progress - BINGO! they suddenly had a website up and online to look at where the limits of the 1970s flood had been! I was furious! They had all that GIS information up and running on an interactive website and they kept the whole thing behind a paywall. Which is why they could turn it on for public free use within a few short hours while they were evacuating their offices. There is absolutely no way they could have done that, without having it already up and running. All they did was remove the need to pay for access. Absolute bastards! During those 2011 floods I helped a lady trying to save some of her stuff. She had just moved to Brisbane and bought a unit in a zone that was then flooding. So I know I was not alone in not having ready access to flood risk information. Just one of many who had no idea of the risk because the council/state made sure people would not know. Everyone was so busy cleaning up afterwards that as far as I know there were never any consequences for what I consider to be border line criminal.

Imagine you are a public servant and you know there is a risk to life and property but you refuse to tell the tax payer/rate payer unless they pay you a fee to find out. Tell me that's not criminal, professional negligence.

They used to run stories on the TV about the 74 floods all the time, and if you knew any locals for any length of time it should have come up.


When I came to Brisbane I looked carefully at the real estate market. Coming from Sydney it utterly baffled me. I had advice not to buy for 12 months to understand the market. After a year I had it pinned.


I'm 30k out of town on a mountain. It's inconvenient especially now I'm blind and can't drive. We have no bus service here. I knew what I was buying, the problems and the advantages.


I don't rely on the government. They are either incompetent or deliberately lying and trying to wreck you.

Last year between January and July my garage and workshop was flooded six times. The water actually came in on some occasions when the rain had stopped. Council drain was blocked causing the water to backflow into my garage.
Made a call to council to clear drains.
This year in January, despite the heavy down pour we had my garage was dry. (Where I work 2k away had several areas water damaged as the drains could not cope.)

Originally Posted by damian

They used to run stories on the TV about the 74 floods all the time, and if you knew any locals for any length of time it should have come up.


When I came to Brisbane I looked carefully at the real estate market. Coming from Sydney it utterly baffled me. I had advice not to buy for 12 months to understand the market. After a year I had it pinned.


I'm 30k out of town on a mountain. It's inconvenient especially now I'm blind and can't drive. We have no bus service here. I knew what I was buying, the problems and the advantages.


I don't rely on the government. They are either incompetent or deliberately lying and trying to wreck you.

If you had relied on 74 reports for this flood you would have been in trouble. The area I grew up in has never flooded in recorded history, but it went under just 2km from ocean.

In 4 days we had over 1600mm at Mt Glorious which is east of Wivenhoe and over 1000mm of rain at Bracken Ridge. If you are going to blame the government for that then it should be for a lack of commitment to dealing with climate change. This was an obscene amount of rain that flooded areas outside of the Brisbane river catchment areas.

The stories of 74 only served to prompt me to investigate.


The GDR D'Agliars and the border ranges form a triangle. All the water that falls in that triangle goes out through the rivers. The northern end ultimately ends up in the Brisbane.


There is only about 150 years of rain data and it's gets more patchy the further you go back. Humans don't relate to long term trends well. We are programmed to deal with annual cycles not century and millenia cycles. Unfortunately nature doesn't work on that scale.


If you want to be scared have a look at how little we understand solar cycles. The sun doesn't burn at a constant rate and we know SFA about it's patterns.

After dealing with some flooding myself, the best advice is to have a plan to quickly get stuff higher when the water starts. I have a timber collection as well. It laid on some "sacrificial" boards that are considerably more rot resistant. I had all sorts of stuff standing on top of old paint cans, cement blocks, and the like.

The next thing is air circulation. Get those shed doors open. Get air circulating as quickly as possible, and it will dry surprisingly fast, mostly with little damage.

Next is to cut your losses. Strip ALL effected drywall and flooring to ~ 1 meter above the flooding. The exposed walls, tile, linoleum, and sub-floor will dry quick, but carpet, carpet pad, laminate flooring, insulation, and drywall sealed walls will not. Rip it all out, get air circulating. Mold losses will be minimized. Repairs go a lot faster if they don't have to work around 300mm of sodden mush inside the walls which only rot them.

Best of luck.