Australian Flood Crisis Just Gets Worse and Worse

Australia is beginning to suffer the Wrath Of JHVH G-d. And, this is just the very beginning. Will Australia make into the Kingdom? At this rate probably not. We'll see. - Spy on America.

The flood crisis in Queensland in Australia has moved from bad to worse. The latest city to be hammered is Toowoomba, which sits on top of the Mountain Range about 70 miles to the West of Brisbane, the State Capital. This is a special report from Andrew Bolt with some pretty graphic videos. What needs to be realised here is that these are the main streets through the centre of the City. The floods came up not slowly, but in a matter of minutes. I have also included a link to a gallery of images as well. While the flood here in Rockhampton continues with the River still at 9.1 Metres, (29 feet 7 inches) this is barely 2 inches off the peak. In the Lockyer Valley at the foot of the Mountain below Toowoomba, the rivers and creeks also rose swiftly, some as fast as three metres in five minutes and all people had time to do was to get on the roofs of their houses. To date, eight people have been confirmed as dead, and the missing number in the seventies…..TonyfromOz.

Link to Image Gallery from Toowoomba
TOOWOOMBA DROWNS
By Andrew Bolt

An astonishing flash flood in Toowoomba kills at least four people. Rods are turned into raging rivers:

Cars are swept away like boats:

The costs are astonishing:

THE financial toll of the Queensland floods – predicted to cost $6 billion and leave a $5bn clean-up bill – is expected to soar further.
Yesterday’s flash floods engulfed the urban areas of Toowoomba and Gympie and threatened to hit Brisbane.

One lesson – dams don’t just harvest water cheaply but help protect from floods:

A BODY of floodwater larger than Sydney Harbour threatens Brisbane, with only the Wivenhoe Dam’s 2.3km-long earthen wall standing in its path…
Wivenhoe was rising fast, but it had the potential to go past 200 per cent capacity before overflowing. Cr Newman said the dam was doing its job but could not fully protect the city because of the dimension of the floods.

Premier Anna Bligh is grateful for the dam:

Without a doubt the Wivenhoe Dam has already saved Brisbane from a catastrophic flood in the next 48 hours but we have to keep releasing water from it so it can keep doing the job it’s doing.

UPDATE
Police cannot tell if this family survived the wall the water that swept through Toowoomba:

Last night, four people were confirmed dead, taking the death toll related to the Queensland floods to at least 15.
Up to four children are also missing from Toowoomba and surrounding townships after West Creek burst its banks, pouring a cascade of brown, debris-laden water into the city centre. Up to 2m of water gushed through the streets, sweeping up cars, washing off the facades of Federation-era buildings, tearing up roads and blowing out shop-fronts.

UPDATE 2
Gympie is flooded by the Mary River:

The Mary River at Gympie north-west of the Sunshine Coast in south-east Queensland has peaked at 19.3 metres, just below the 20 metre prediction.  Floodwaters have split the CBD in half and several businesses in the main street have been inundated.

The Mary was the site of a proposed dam banned by Environment Minister Peter Garrett:

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett on Wednesday said he made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species…
“The project would have serious and irreversible effects on national listed species such as the Australian lungfish, the Mary River turtle and the Mary River cod – both of those endangered.

Gavin Atkins quotes a Queensland Government document showing a dam on the Mary could cut the flooding by four metres – enough to save all but four of the shops in Gympie’s main street:

A numeric hydraulic model for the Mary River has been developed. The numeric model has been calibrated to ensure good correlation between measured historical data and simulated modelled behaviour with regards to peak flow, peak water levels, total volume and flood timings. The reduced outflow hydrograph for the 1999 flood event as determined above was input into this model.
The results of which demonstrate that had the dam been in existence at the time of the 1999 flood, the dam would have reduced peak water levels through Gympie by approximately 4 metres.

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