Devastated residents of Australia’s third-largest city dug their ruined possessions out of piles of putrid sludge as deadly floodwaters that swamped entire neighborhoods receded yesterday, revealing the grim aftermath of one of the nation’s worst natural disasters.
The sickening stench of spoiled food and muck from the swollen Brisbane River permeated the city of 2 million, where more than 30,000 homes and businesses were flooded.
In towns upstream of Brisbane, soldiers picked their way through debris looking for more victims. Weeks of flooding across Australia’s northeast have caused 26 deaths, while 53 people were still missing.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“There is a lot of heartache and grief as people start to see for the first time what has happened to their homes and their streets,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said. “In some cases, we have street after street after street where every home has been inundated to the roof level.”
One man drowned on Thursday when he was sucked into a storm drain as he tried to check on his father’s home in an inundated Brisbane neighborhood. Bligh said searchers found a woman’s body yesterday morning. Officials expected to find more bodies farther upstream as they finally got access to hamlets struck by flash flooding on Monday.
Most of the people still unaccounted for are from around Toowoomba, a city west of Brisbane in the Lockyer Valley where a sudden downpour caused a flash flood likened to an inland tsunami.
PHOTO: AFP
Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said yesterday that officials may never be able to find everyone swept away by the raging torrent.
“We would certainly hope they would find them all,” Atkinson said. “Regrettably, we could not exclude completely the possibility that some may never be found.”
Water was still high in some areas yesterday, but had pulled back dramatically in others to reveal mountains of muddy wreckage.
Officials asked the Australian Defence Force for a minesweeper to search the mouth of the river for sunken debris.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard doubled the number of defense personnel involved in the recovery effort to 1,200, the largest deployment for a natural disaster since Cyclone Tracy destroyed the northern city of Darwin in 1974.
“There’s a lot of dirt, a lot of filth, a lot of mess that needs to be cleaned up,” Gillard said. “We’ve been through some very difficult days and there’s still a lot to go through in the weeks and months that lie ahead.”
About 57,000 homes were still without power across Queensland and the military was delivering food, clothes and other supplies to areas still cut off by the waters.
Health officials told people to throw out anything that had touched the contaminated waters.
“What the city has to prepare itself for ... is the unbearable stench,” Bligh said. “The smell of it is just unspeakable.”
Brisbane resident Kirsten Norquay was trying to figure out how to break the news to her hospitalized sister that everything she owns is now destroyed.
Norquay’s sister, who is mentally ill, lives on the ground floor of their house and had no idea muddy floodwaters had ruined all of her belongings. She was due to be released from the hospital yesterday and Norquay feared she would have a breakdown when confronted by the devastating sight of the wreckage.
“We have like a massive pile of all her life’s belongings on the front grass,” she said. “The only thing I saved was her photos.”
Police officers were patrolling the flooded streets of Brisbane and other waterlogged communities around the clock. Ten people have been charged with looting in the past week, police said.
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