The only good news in all this is that we have been all advised to have tomorrow off, and both myself and partner have been told not to come in tomorrow, which is great, as it was pretty scary being at work today not knowing if we’d be able to get home!
We live 2-3km away from the Bohle River, unbelievably it has broken its banks and has spread right through into the parks and barbecue area of my estate, right at the end of my street. The only road in and out of the estate is getting close to being underwater. It’s not impacting any houses yet, but another 1020mm over the next week will not be good at all!!
Major Flood Warning issued in Townsville, emergency alert texts going out, river expected to rise and cause inundation in multiple city suburbs.
Here’s that warning from the BOM:
Media: Transmitters serving the Ross, Bohle and Black Rivers are REQUESTED TO USE THE STANDARD EMERGENCY WARNING SIGNAL BEFORE BROADCASTING THIS MESSAGE.
TOP PRIORITY: The Bureau and Emergency Services would appreciate this message being broadcast regularly.
Major Flood Warning for the Ross and Bohle Rivers and Flood Warning for the Black River and Bluewater Creek
Issued at 12:15 pm EST on Friday 1 February 2019
Flood Warning Number: 17
Property flooding is expected in the Ross River early Friday afternoon. Major flood levels are possible in the Ross River at Aplin Weir over the weekend with forecast heavy rainfall.
Important information from Townsville City Council:
It is really important that residents listen to emergency services or Council employees during this flood event.
The increase in flow from Ross River Dam may result in flooding of properties and the public are advised to move personal items to a higher level.
Authorities will further open the Ross River Dam spillway gates to try and prevent more significant flooding for downstream suburbs if this major rain event continues.
The spillway gates will be opened to a higher level, allowing more water to flow out now in order to reduce the potential for significant downstream flooding given the forecast for heavy rain to continue for the next few days.
Flooding in Townsville is getting extremely bad.
Heavy rain hasn’t stopped, and the dam is now at 240%, it is overflowing so much that at least a quarter of the city is expected to go under with officials saying 20,000 homes will go under, though many say this is conservative at this point.
All of this is based on what is happening now… heavy rain is set to continue until mid to late week, just making everything even worse.
I cannot believe the lack of coverage in mainstream media on this emergency. I’ve had many family who live around the country saying they didn’t realise it was this bad because it’s just not getting coverage.
If this was happening closer to Brisbane, there would be rolling coverage… the last time Brisbane flooded there was rolling coverage, what is happening in Townsville now is just as bad, if not worse than the situation in Brisbane, yet is getting barely a mention.
Watched Nine News First at 5 this afternoon and there was a 1-minute piece that aired at 5:08.
From what I’ve been hearing about the Townsville floods, this is really a story that should be leading news bulletins and newspaper front pages right around the country IMO. If a similar crisis affected Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne, it’d probably even be making international news!
Aside from that commentary about the media coverage, I really hope your place is OK and that you’ve got a contingency plan if the worst is expected to happen.
We have been told not to come in tomorrow, and told possibly not Tuesday either. I haven’t been out driving for obvious reasons, but I would dare say I wouldn’t even be able to get to work anyway.
The latest flood maps released this afternoon have my workplace being inundated, so could be away from work for quite a while if that were to happen.
We are fine for now, though was very touch and go yesterday. We had about 300mm of rain in 3 hours yesterday morning and the river (combined with the storm water drains being unable to handle the water) came right up into our estate to the point where the next street over was knee deep in water, many houses were flooded. Our street is slightly higher so we only had ankle deep water in the street, that did not make it up into the houses. But many houses were flooded all around us in multiple streets, quite possibly could have been hundreds of houses, but our area hasn’t even had coverage in the local media, let alone beyond that.
I went out to walk around and look at what was going on and every single street surrounding us was ankle to knee deep in water. As our street was the only slightly higher street around, there were heaps of cars parked on it from others nearby that were flooding.
The majority of our suburb is without power, but we are extremely lucky to still have power at this stage.
The rain eased overnight and most of that water dropped back enough to get it out of the houses at least, but it will not take much to bring it right back up again.
This house is the 3rd place I’ve had in Townsville since moving here and the previous 2 I lived in have been flooded, so we are extremely lucky to this point!
We had a reasonable story about it all on 7 Tas news tonight, couldn’t believe some of those figures. Nearly our annual rainfall in 24 hours and the like. Obviously didn’t lead our coverage as we had a pretty bad day with the fires again with several places either returning to emergency levels or new fires starting and new emergencies.
Hope you’re ok and on safe levels and that people do heed all the emergency warnings and evacuations. Also, make sure you watch out for electricity. It can be so dangerous in flooding situations because of what you can’t see or when people aren’t thinking in the moment. Hope you can get some sleep tonight and your workplace manages to escape, I’ve been through flooded workplaces before to get their systems up and running again and it’s a mess what can happen.
It is making international news, earlier this afternoon I was listening to Class 95FM Singapore online & the floods in Townsville got a mention in a couple of the hourly news updates, the newsreader didn’t pronounce the Qld Premier’s last name correctly but it’s not the most easy surname to pronounce I suppose.
Slightly off topic but the ABC shared a video of some school kids trying to say the NSW Premier’s name too! Must be just a series of hard to pronounce Premiers at the moment. Not like the old days of Carr and Bacon and Rann etc…
Still the major metropolitan/national media need to be doing better. From what I can tell, it wasn’t overly high up the list of tonight’s Sydney 6pm news bulletins for example.
I have heard from someone in Sydney who said they mentioned it to a group at their workplace and no one had a clue what they were talking about.
Was speaking today to a friend who moved from Townsville to Northern NSW early last year, when we told her how bad it was, she said she had heard it was raining lots here but the local media weren’t making a big deal out of it and she didn’t realise it was anywhere near as bad as it is.
I know it’s a massive annoyance amongst locals the lack of coverage, found this comment on Facebook earlier:
“TO ALL TV NETWORKS
SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!
Half a million people affected by natural disaster in North Queensland and the TV coverage consists of repeats of MKR and Married at First Site and all manner of other repeated crap. If this much rain fell in Brisbane we would have full ongoing coverage and constant updates on every chanel. Thousands of people displaced and evacuated and no TV coverage to show the affected areas and what is to come. Good on the Premier for her 5 minute conference from Brisbane this morning. Would this be the case if Townsville was the capital city of a North Queensland State? SHARE IF YOU AGREE.”
The situation has deteriorated drastically tonight, the water is so high that people are on their rooves in parts of the city and there’s a 3 hour backlog on emergency calls because there are so many coming through. Official advice for evacuation zones said people in low level homes need to leave and higher homes need to decide for themselves, but hearing tonight that people have stayed in double story houses and are now getting water up through the upper story. From what i’m hearing i’d be surprised if there aren’t people killed tonight in this. This is truly a catastrophic disaster, yet most of Australia wouldn’t know it’s even happening. We’ve had rolling coverage for cyclones before and this is far, far worse and barely get more than 5 minutes of coverage. This happening in a major city, it’s got to be one of the worst natural disasters in Australian history.
I don’t understand what this has to do with MKR or Married at First Site airing? This so this post is a bit out of whack. It should be covered on the news yes, but I’m not sure there is any point of having 24/7 rolling coverage of floods on commercial networks in primetime unless there is anything majorly new to report on. They would have newsbreak updates and I’m sure ABC News 24 have that covered a lot more for those that want it. I’ve heard a lot about it this morning anyway on radio and commercial networks so it’s not being ignored.
I think the reason those reality programs were mentioned is because the networks are prioritising fairly unimportant repeats of said shows over coverage of an historic weather event affecting something like half a million people.
Townsville is a major regional city that most Australians have heard of and from all reports, their current flood crisis is the city’s worst ever. It deserves rolling coverage at least in Queensland IMO.
The minimal coverage is bizarre; even for those selfish people who don’t have any compassion for the people suffering through this, self interest means we will all be paying for this damage (and into the future) both by higher insurance premiums and tax money to repair/replace public infrastructure.
The cynic in me wonders if it’s not just because it’s not Brisbane/Sydney/etc., but perhaps also the vested interests/right-wing bias of much of Australia’s concentrated media who continue to downplay the reality of the extreme weather climate scientists have warned global warming would cause (and now is causing/making worse).
Regardless of anyone’s doubts about the cause of this disaster, it should be getting much higher prominence in the media.
