Two Jays Away: Flood blog on the the fly

After weeks of hearing that the dams upstream should keep us safe, there has been a major breach and we now find ourselves in a flood zone. The dams are holding up to 200% capacity with all gates open and water spilling over the top. There are three catchment areas that drain into the Brisbane River and all are feeding in more than the river can handle.
Brisbane is in a geographical situation similar to London, in that it is essentially built on an estuary. The river is dealing with water draining in from the catchment areas, but also dealing with tidal water coming in from the ocean. These two walls of water meet and the river has no where to go but over its banks. Our problem here is not that the river water will meet us, but that the storm sewer water levels are rising with the river level. We are currently sitting about 2.5m above the street level of the storm sewer, and the water is sitting right below the street level. It has come up about half a metre since this morning. High tide today will peak at ~2pm and that will give us a couple more metres of water. The model suggests that water levels will be higher than 1974, not good news for anyone.
We are very lucky though. There are evacuation centres here and we have had time to move everything up from the ground level of our townhouse. We are not in any mortal danger, unlike the flash flood victims from Toowoomba on Monday. There are at least 10 dead and another 60 missing. We know that things could be much worse but we have done everything that we can. Now we have 12 - 24 hours to get through. If we don't get flooded by this time tomorrow, we should be fine.