Russell Whyatt remembers how fast the water rose in 2011.
In the space of 30 minutes it went from bordering his Bundamba property to waist height.
He escaped with a handful of documents and his children's birth certificates but everything else was lost.
"When I came back to the house four days later, it was like an apocalypse," he said.
"We had nothing – we didn't even have the [money] to clean the house.
"A plasterer came and helped me fix my house for 10 days, another bloke painted my house for nothing."
Mr Whyatt was one of thousands of affected property owners to join a class action that alleged the dam operators failed to follow their own manual and did not make enough room for heavy rainfall until it was too late, heightening flood levels and damaging more properties.
"When I heard about the class action, I told myself whatever money I got from that, I would pay them [those who helped repair his home] back one day," he said.
But it is a debt he has now learned he will not be able to repay.
'Heartbreaking and insulting'
Six weeks ago, Mr Whyatt and several of his neighbours received letters they had been waiting 11 years to receive – but what they found inside was "heartbreaking and insulting".
While the court ruled in favour of the negligence claim against the Queensland government of the day, as well as Seqwater and SunWater, other aspects of the case failed.
Several residents on Keith and Cornish streets are not going to get anything from the class action, despite being among the worst affected.
"Basically, we were led on. And we were led on for 11 years," Mr Whyatt said.
"We were given false hope.
"In the end the only people who won were Maurice Blackburn and [litigation funder] IMF."
Law firm Maurice Blackburn said the payouts were determined by the flood adjustment factor, which is essentially how badly a property would have been affected if the dams had been handled properly.
"The case was run on the basis that there would have been some flooding in Brisbane, no matter what, even if the dams had been operated properly," principal lawyer Rebecca Gilsenan said.
"The difference, or the degree of difference, literally differs for every single property.
"About half of the claims in the case wouldn't have flooded at all on the model that the court ultimately upheld.
"People are finding out now and in some really unfortunate cases, they're finding out that the flooding would not have been a whole lot different.
Ms Gilsenan said they were not able to tell individual people what would have happened to their property along the way.
"Because we didn't have a model yet that had been upheld by the court," she said.
"People were told in theory that this would be an issue and damages would need to be adjusted but people didn't know individually what would happen to them."
Face of class action let down
Maurice Blackburn said last month some of the almost 7,000 claimants had received an interim payment but the total payout would not be distributed until all legal matters associated with the case were finalised.
That could take until the end of this year or early 2023.
Former Goodna resident Frank Beaumont is among that group of people.
He has been one of the most outspoken members of the Goodna community, appearing on television screens just after the disaster in 2011 and crying as he and other flood victims learnt they had won the lengthy legal fight.
He said if he knew what was to come, his reaction would have been very different.
He had to split his interim payment with his ex-wife and received $797.67, despite his Goodna home sustaining $556,000 worth of damage.
"The less you got damaged, the more you're going to get," he said.
"I mean it's laughable.
"We were not told that we may get nothing, even if we won the case.
"[Maurice Blackburn] advertises 'We fight for fair'. Is this fair?"
Ms Gilsenan said she wished the outcome could have been different the arrangement was determined by the court ruling.
"I wish we didn't have a fixed pool to divide up and that we could distribute to them everything that they've lost ... that's what we've wanted to do since the beginning of this litigation," she said.
"I wish that I could give everybody their full compensation, not half compensation to represent a partial victory — not adjusted by flood adjustment factors.
"[But] the court requires us to do that as a condition of the settlement because we have to distribute the settlement on the basis that we won the case."
