BRISBANE, Australia — For weeks, eastern Australia’s flooding has been a slow-motion disaster, with drenching rain devastating wide swaths of farmland and small towns. Now, rivers are rising in Brisbane, the country’s third-largest city, forcing people to flee suburbs and skyscrapers.
Flooding that has unfolded since late November across the waterlogged state of Queens land turned suddenly violent Monday, with a cloudburst sending a raging torrent down the Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane. Hundreds had to be rescued by helicopter Tuesday.
Greg Kowald was driving through the center of the town of Toowoomba when the terrifying wall of water carried away cars and people.
“The water was literally leaping, 6 or 10 feet into the air, through creeks and over bridges and into parks,” Kowald, 53, said Tuesday. “There was nowhere to escape, even if there had been warnings. There was just a sea of water about a kilometer wide.”
The flash flood killed 10 people and left more than 90 missing, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said today. That raised to 20 the number of confirmed dead in all the previous weeks from high water.
Helicopters and other emergency vehicles were moving into the worst-hit towns today, and Bligh warned that the death toll was likely to rise.
Windows exploded, cars bobbed in the churning brown water and people desperately clung to power poles to survive in Toowoomba. Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson described it as “an inland instant tsunami.”
In Brisbane, 80 miles east of Toowoomba, Mayor Campbell Newman said almost 20,000 homes in low areas of the city of about 2 million were expected to be swamped by Thursday, when the river system is expected to crest near the levels of a devastating 1974 flood.
The Brisbane River broke its banks Tuesday and was continuing its rise today, partly controlled by a huge dam upstream that has had its floodgates opened because it is brimming after weeks of rain.
