Residents in Queensland’s capital are preparing for impact – and for some it’s bringing back memories of the 2022 floods
One month ago, when Alice Dent moved into her bottom-floor riverfront unit in the Brisbane suburb of Toowong, she told herself the city couldn’t possibly flood twice in the same decade.
But with category two Tropical Cyclone Alfred bearing down on the city, the university student is having second thoughts. Like thousands of Brisbane residents, Dent spent Tuesday morning at a sandbag depot getting ready for inundation.
With its first five sandbag sites facing huge demand, the Brisbane city council opened four additional depots on Tuesday. But there was still a two-hour wait at the Toowong site, a former bowls club – and elsewhere, others queued for even longer.
“I think everyone’s pretty traumatised from ‘22, like everyone remembers it very vividly. I don’t think anyone wants a repeat of that,” Dent says, referring to 2022, when parts of New South Wales and Queensland – including Brisbane – were hit by flooding.
Dent received some advice from a friends’ mum – Margaret Cook, a historian of Brisbane floods – through Facebook. “She said it’s probably going to flood, and even if not, it’s always best to be prepared,” Dent says.
After 12 days heading south, Tropical Cyclone Alfred executed a dramatic right turn on Tuesday afternoon as predicted. It is now heading directly for Brisbane and is expected to become the first cyclone to make landfall at the Queensland capital since 1974.
On Tuesday evening, the lord mayor, Adrian Schrinner, warned “almost 20,000 properties could be impacted by storm surge or flooding” according to modelling conducted by Brisbane city council based on Bureau of Meteorology forecasts.
Schrinner said the council had already distributed an “unprecedented” 74,000 sandbags on Monday, while the acting police commissioner, Shane Chelepy, said there were another 250,000 on order to arrive in the next 24 hours.
Queensland’s premier, David Crisafulli, warned against complacency on Tuesday afternoon, saying there was “still an element of the population that hasn’t yet fully understood the magnitude of this system”.
“One thing I know about Queenslanders is they handle disasters better than anywhere else and we have proven that time and time again,” he said.
Several residents Guardian Australia spoke to at two sandbagging depots were not concerned about flooding affecting their own properties. Instead, they lined up for hours to gather supplies for their neighbours, children, parents or friends unable to help themselves.
Nicky Haesler and Billy Fogarty gathered sandbags for their downstairs neighbour. They live in the upstairs of a Queenslander in the Brisbane suburb of Red Hill and expect to stay dry.
“His house floods every time that it rains. We have contingency plans if he needs to come upstairs while his place gets flooded. But hopefully this helps,” Haesler says.
Peter and Maggie Castle, English migrants in their 70s, spent Tuesday helping their daughter prepare her residence in Bulimba, another Brisbane suburb.
“The property is slightly raised, [but] underneath, there’s a garage and various other things, all the electrics. So obviously she was very concerned that it needed to be done as quickly as possible,” Peter says.
Josh Humphrey, who was gathering sandbags at the Whites Hill Reserve depot in Brisbane’s Camp Hill to help protect his parents’ place, believes this time could be as bad as 2022.
“The water was still flowing out, even though the tide was supposed to be coming in,” he says, describing sitting at the river on Tuesday morning at the low-tide change. “We saw that and said, well, here comes 2022 again, because it was exactly the same way that it started [that time].”