A wild week

Only a week ago we went into work and found out that there was a flood warning for low-lying areas in Brisbane.  We felt like we were being a bit paranoid, or maybe even just a couple of big babies, but we left work at around noon.  That mood quickly changed when our office closed for the day, then the reality of the flood really started to set in.  We moved all of our furniture upstairs, almost got stranded in a suburb trying to evacuate and eventually spent 2 nights in a hotel.  For all this, we were extremely fortunate.  We keep saying that we were lucky and now we can show just how lucky we were.

On January 14, the day after the waters peaked, a company called "Near Map" did a high resolution photo grid of Brisbane.  Below is a screen shot of how close the waters came to our house.  The waters had already started ot recede at this time, but the marks are still visible.  Our house is marked with a pink dot.  Suncorp Stadium is on the right-hand side of the photo.  The normal bank of the Brisbane River is about 700m to the south of our house.  The townhouse to the right of our place was under about 2 feet of water and is currently uninhabitable. 

Here is a zoom in on our house.  That water was closer than we thought.  It wasn't just the storm drains that we had to worry about, but the water spilling in from the yards to the north of us.  We are glad we didn't know that last week, ignorance it bliss!

There are some really good websites and photo sites that give thorough views of the flood waters.

The website that we used for the screen captures is http://www.nearmap.com/.  Type in "Brisbane, QLD" into the box marked "Find".  The option to choose, if it doesn't default there, is "Photomap".  If there are heavy coloured lines marking the streets, hover the mouse on Photomap until a menu appears and click off "streetview".  This website is pretty busy, so it might take a few tries to get in.

There are also some great before and after shots on the Australia Broadcasting Corporation site.  Click on the link and hover your mouse over the pictures, moving the bar that appears from side to side.  These shots show just how bad the flooding was:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/infographics/qld-floods/beforeafter.htm


Since last weeks floodpeak we have had 7 straight days of beautiful sunny weather...here's hoping we get more of this and not more rain.  We're all getting a little shell shocked!