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Queensland’s premier has declared “day one” of a recovery that will take years as the state prepares to wake to clear skies that should reveal the vast scale of its outback floods.
But despite forecasts the rain will pass for soaked central and south-west Queensland by Thursday, towns and homesteads could be cut off or at risk of flooding for weeks to come, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s senior meteorologist, Dean Narramore.
That is after a band of rain dumped falls of between 50mm to 100mm in the 24 hours to 9am on Wednesday across an area of central Queensland from Mount Isa down towards Charleville, including falls of 161mm in Tambo.
“All the rainfall overnight is going to lead to prolonged flooding out west as well as renewed river level rises,” Narramore said.
Narramore said that most of the 50mm to 100mm fell on the upper catchments of “very large and very slow moving rivers” that were already undergoing major flooding.
“So that will continue to feed down in the coming days and weeks,” he said.
“There’s incredible flooding out there, and likely to continue for days, if not weeks, right across south west Queensland”.
Narramore said the new downpours – that had continued a weather event the bureau officially dates to 23 March – were weakening as they headed south-east and should move offshore by Wednesday evening.
Narramore said clear skies forecast for Thursday inland should reveal rivers swollen tens of kilometres wide and muddy seas and lakes upon normally parched plains.
“You’re going to see some incredible imagery I’m sure tomorrow from this huge part of south-west Queensland that is currently flooded,” he said.
And as the flood waters eventually drain to the Kati Thanda- Lake Eyre or down the Murray Darling basins, entire towns will gradually emerge from the muck.
The Queensland premier, David Crisafulli, said he had met the 28 residents of the town of Adavale, all of whom had been evacuated about 85km down the Bulloo River to Quilpie.
“Across the 20 homes, every single one of those homes has damage in that habitable area,” Crisafulli said.
“So there’s not a single place in that community where you can use as the rebuild, not a single place that you could say people can go to that life can be a bit normal”.
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Speaking from Longreach on Wednesday morning, Crisafulli said that 90 people from Thargomindah were in an evacuation centre as flood waters continued to rise there and that he had also met with residents of Jundah who had been evacuated to Longreach.
“There’s no doubt that some of the smaller communities, Adavale, Jundah, have really copped a beating through this”.
As well as damage to property, the premier said the magnitude of stock losses “continues to rise” – with the latest estimate of lost or dead livestock “now approaching 150,000”.
“That’s somewhere in the order of 70,000 cattle, 70,000 sheep and 10,000 goats and horses,” he said. “And, I stress, this number will continue to rise. This is only the first stage of the damage assessments”.
The agricultural industry will also have to patch or rebuild about 4,700km of private roads that have been affected and about 3,500km of fencing, with Crisafulli highlighting the need to rebuild exclusion fencing rolled out over recent decades to protect the sheep industry from canine depredation – or face a return of what he called “the bad old days of wild dogs roaming free”.
“This is not going to be a recovery that happens in days or weeks, this recovery will take months and years,” he said.
The recovery will include the construction of a $10m new weather radar in western Queensland after the federal emergency management minister, Jenny McAllister, said Labor would match a commitment made by the Coalition on Monday.
