The cleanup has begun in flood-affected parts of Queensland but thousands of homes will remain without power until the weekend.
All police emergency warnings for the region have been cancelled after the rain caused by ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred eased.
Dylan Gatt and his two housemates evacuated their rental house in Woolloongabba’s Churchill Street. “This is the third time it’s flooded since we’ve been here, which is only six months,” he told the Guardian.
Teams of volunteers from the Queensland Greens have helped Gatt clean up the home. The lower levels of many homes in the Brisbane suburb were inundated by flash flooding from Norman Creek.
Gatt said he and his house mates don’t feel safe in the home, but had few options because the rental market was so tight.
“We feel very on edge,” he said.
By Tuesday afternoon about 80,000 homes in the state’s south-east were still without power.
Energex is aiming to reconnect power to 95% of those dwellings by Friday. Power has been returned to all critical infrastructure, like water treatment plans and mobile phone towers, according to Essential Energy.
But thousands of homes and businesses in suburbs such as Greenbank, Capalaba, Alexandra Hills and Currumbin Waters are not scheduled to get power back until Saturday night. About 551 customers in Logan Village, south of Brisbane, won’t be reconnected until Sunday.
Local MPs representing Greenbank are concerned about elderly residents in the community. “It’ll be over a week that these people haven’t had power,” the Labor MP for Jordan, Charis Mullen said.
More than 330,000 homes have had power restored in what is by “far the biggest electricity reconnection in Queensland we’ve ever had,” a spokesperson for Energex said.
Meanwhile, many residents in the state’s south-east are breathing a sigh of relief at avoiding a repeat of the 2022 flood.
The city of Ipswich narrowly avoided severe flooding overnight, after the Bremer River peaked just below the “major” flood level.
Parts of the Ipswich CBD and some suburbs had been inundated, and residents had been nervously watching the river height in the early hours of Tuesday.
The town of Laidley was flooded on Monday and the flood siren at Grantham – a legacy of the 2011 flooding that devastated the town – was sounded, warning residents to leave.
Generally, the severity of rainfall brought by ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred had eased on Tuesday.
In Brisbane, flash flooding occurred in city creeks early on Monday, after the city recorded 275.2mm in the 24 hours to 9am, the largest single-day rainfall since the city’s 1974 floods.
Flooding occurred in similar places to 2022, but the creeks subsided through Monday morning.
‘Significant’ economic impact
A record 450,000 people in the south-east have been affected by power outages since Thursday.
The premier, David Crisafulli, said the State Emergency Service received 3,500 jobs in 24 hours on Sunday: “The most ever recorded.”
He said the recovery is going to be a “big effort” and the economic impact “significant”.
“We’ve got a state that’s got a lot of work to do,” he told ABC News Breakfast on Tuesday morning.
“We will make sure that we move from response to recovery, and we move there quickly. We have to make sure that every single person is given the opportunity to get life back to normal, and that work is certainly under way.”
Commonwealth personal hardship grants worth $180 for individuals or $900 for families have been activated for Redlands, Gold Coast, Logan, Moreton Bay, as well as for targeted areas in the Fraser Coast, adding to councils already covered.
The area was slowly returning to normal, with supermarkets, airports and select Brisbane bus services operating again. However, the Warrego Highway connecting Brisbane to Toowoomba remained closed until further notice.
South of the border, residents have returned home after evacuation orders were lifted in some northern New South Wales towns.
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, said evacuation centres for 700 people must close once warnings were lifted because they were not meant to be a long-term fix.
About 1,800 people were isolated by flood waters in NSW on Monday and more than 10,000 people were under emergency warnings.
