Large parts of the capital of Queensland state resembled a muddy lake, with an entire waterfront cafe among the debris washing down the Brisbane River, a torrent that has flooded 12,000 homes in the city of 2 million and left 118,000 buildings without power. With 35 suburbs flooded, many parts of Brisbane looked more like Venice as residents used boats to move about flooded streets, where traffic signs peeped above the stagnant water. The floodwaters destroyed or damaged many parts of the city's infrastructure. One group of residents was lucky not to disappear into gushing waters when the street they were walking along collapsed. "The ground started to move and began to rumble like thunder. We all started to run as fast as we could," said Rebecca Bush. "The next minute we heard this huge cracking noise that sounded like lightning had just struck. We turned around and the pathway was gone. It had completely collapsed." Aerial views of Brisbane showed a sea of brown water with rooftops poking through the surface. "What I'm seeing looks more like a war zone in some places," Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. "All I could see was their rooftops ... underneath every single one of those rooftops is a horror story," she told reporters after surveying the disaster from the air.
"This morning as I look across not only the capital city, but three-quarters of my state, we are facing a reconstruction effort of post-war proportions," Bligh said.
An emotional Bligh said her state, reliant on farming and mining in rugged outback regions, would recover regardless of the cost and estimates that three quarters of it -- an area the size of South Africa -- was now officially a disaster zone. Officials warned of the risk of further severe flooding in the coming weeks, with two months of the wet season ahead and already overflowing dams requiring seven days to empty to normal levels to cope with more heavy rains. The Bureau of Meteorology forecast that a storm in the Coral Sea off Queensland's north coast would become a cyclone in 24 to 48 hours, but while it would bring fresh rains to Queensland, it was expected to move away from the coast. Queensland has received so much rain in the past two months the ground is fully waterlogged and dams are full, meaning any more heavy rain will further swell already flooded rivers. The deluge has been blamed on a La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific. Last year was Australia's third wettest on record, and weather officials forecast an above average cyclone season.
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