Grim monument to lives swept away in Lockyer Valley

HOUSES ripped from their foundations, cars, trees and animals carried for kilometres by the torrent of water that raged through the Lockyer Valley.

A police diver searches under a bridge near Grantham. Picture: John Grainger

HOUSES ripped from their foundations, cars, trees and animals carried for kilometres by the torrent of water that raged through the Lockyer Valley.

The search for dozens of missing people is concentrated along the trail of destruction carved by the water as it cascaded off the Great Dividing Range, demolishing homes in Murphys Creek and headed towards Brisbane.

Police were yesterday scouring a tangle of debris caught in a railway bridge in Grantham, 25km east of Murphys Creek. Parts of houses, trees, wheelie bins, furniture and up to a dozen cars lie scattered over and around the wooden and steel bridge, each adding to the ledger of human disaster.

A rolled-up swag and a football were incongruously perched on top of the bridge surrounded by Eskys, a gas bottle, wheels ripped from cars and what appeared to be an upturned golf buggy.

Police divers yesterday checked cars submerged beneath what looks like a river but is in fact a road into Grantham that passes under the Brisbane to Toowoomba railway line.

Video shot on Monday from the veranda of the nearby Grantham Hotel, now destroyed, shows cars being tossed around in a macabre wildwater ride.

Grantham is grieving its own losses, but it is feared that many victims from further upstream may be found in and around the town. One body was yesterday found in Grantham. But nine people are missing from Murphys Creek alone.

Grantham resident Linda Weston told the ABC she was terrified as the water smashed through the town. "Just houses exploding. Houses floating past with people in it. Big shipping containers," she said. "The debris is just too much. To see people screaming out on roofs to get help has just been horrible. I wouldn't ask anyone to go through this. You could build another house out of just the debris under my house."

Along the way to Grantham, the roadways, rail lines and creek beds of the once rural idylls like Murphys Creek and Postmans Ridge resembled a never-ending road smash. The flotsam and jetsam of Monday's carnage when a 300mm dump of rain overwhelmed the landscape's ability to drain was the familiar, violent signature of a natural disaster.

Car bodies were strewn in paddocks. Water tanks and shipping containers lay tangled with large trees ripped out by their roots.

Corrugated iron littered the landscape like discarded paper. The bottleneck closed at Grantham was where police established their command post to untangle the fruits of disaster and the hunt for bodies was being concentrated.

Shocked residents were finally returning yesterday to the carnage below the Toowoomba escarpment, where freak rains turned placid streams into raging waters strong enough to punch through houses and wipe away all evidence of life.

Survivors spent yesterday picking through muddy debris. For some it was a task made more painful by the presence of an empty concrete slab that used to be a low-set brick bungalow next door.

Rob and Lola Manteit were among the lucky ones.

Their Postmans Ridge home, where their daughter sat out the storm as they struggled to find a way home, is battered but still standing. Across the road, Rod Alford's treasured 1971 Mustang Fastback did not escape unscathed but at least it is still there.

Four immediate neighbours were not so lucky.

Upstream, where the torrent formed as water cascaded from every direction into unprepared gullies, the forensic detail of what took place is etched deeper into the landscape.

The floodwaters did not so much break the stream banks as overwhelm the landscape's ability to cope. Where creek beds meandered, Monday's wall of water leapt between valleys to flatten everything in its path.

Everyone had the same story: an explosion of water from an unexpected direction followed by a sustained torrent from a swollen water course that took days to subside.

At Grantham the police command post was established in what can only be described as a mass crime scene. The investigations took place surrounded by evidence of turmoil - scattered boats, water tanks, caravans, the possessions of unknown people a long way away who were yet to be identified. The railway bridge had acted like a giant sieve to block the rushing debris, including cars that may give a final answer to the riddle of some of those missing.

A lone ambulance streaked its way through the mud as linesmen worked to restore electricity.

Right across the food-bowl plains, the land has been stripped of vegetation and left streaked with erosion channels from the raging waters.

On higher ground, out of the flood zone, it is picture perfect semi-rural living. Shiny rooftops and backyards with azure swimming pools. New roads in new housing estates waiting for development.

While the water has left the upper reaches it has drained to add to an already overflowing Wivenhoe Dam where the flood gates are open wide, water gushing in a rooster tail from five gates.

Even the emergency spillway is discharging, producing rapids that feed the swollen, spreading brown sludge moving ever closer to the suburbs of Brisbane.

Ipswich was swamped yesterday. Houses were submerged to the rooftops in low-lying suburbs such as Goodna.

There were grand homesteads with only the gabled rooftops visible from the brown floodwaters.

Brisbane has had more warning of what to expect than the residents of Murphys Creek, Postmans Ridge and Grantham. But the scale of damage demonstrates why there is no room for complacency.