When they say every flood is different, they’re not wrong
You would not think that in the middle of a major flood event that people would need to worry about getting enough water but that was a side story of the devastating rain event in Brisbane over the weekend.
Water rushes over the Enoggera Dam spillway on Sunday.
About 600 homes in The Gap lost water supply on Sunday afternoon due to a power failure on one of the pumps that services the suburb. Supply was restored about six hours later but the relatively minor incident was a demonstration of how the impact of this flood is in many ways wider than that of 2011.
While that flood inundated thousands of homes and businesses and cut a swathe of destruction in Brisbane’s riverside suburbs like Toowong, Milton and Fairfield, much of the damage was limited to the Brisbane River floodplain and not the suburban freshwater creeks that feed into it.
This time, the creeks copped it. Mount Glorious, to the west of Brisbane, has received 1.5 metres worth of rain in this event, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. That is nearing its average annual total of about 1600 mm.
Assessing the damage will be an enormous task. At St John’s Wood, a $15 million project to replace the ageing Gresham St bridge across Enoggera Creek was completely submerged.
As we have heard many times over the past few days, every flood is different.
Brisbane oldest water storage facility, the 156 year old Enoggera Dam, was at 210 per cent capacity early on Monday morning, with water flowing over the top of its upper spillway and into Enoggera Creek, blocking road intersections and scattering debris in parks and backyards downstream.
Settlement Road, The Gap remained closed on Monday morning. (Image: Cr Steve Toomey)
Parts of the suburb that had never seen flooding in living memory were turned into raging torrents as the dam spilled.
For residents of The Gap, the weekend was less reminiscent of the 2011 floods and more evocative of the supercell storm event that devastated the suburb one Sunday evening in November, 2008, when trunks of tall gum trees were snapped in half like matchsticks and roof after roof was peeled off homes.
As with that horrible day, The Gap was cut off from the rest of the city for much of Sunday, with its main artery, Waterworks Rd, under water in several places and a landslip on Keperra Hill blocking the alternative route out, Settlement Rd.
That road remained blocked on Monday morning but one thing had changed from the drenching of the past four days. Waking up to a morning of near silence, with clear skies and no rain pounding the roof was as eery as it was welcome.
