Tales of courage shine amid the chaos of Queensland's floods

THE rain started at about noon. It poured down in icy sheets that  turned the creeks of the Lockyer Valley into chocolate-coloured torrents of death.

Ray Vandijk, Grantham flood

THE rain started at about noon. It poured down in icy sheets that soon turned the lazy-flowing creeks of the Lockyer Valley into chocolate-coloured torrents of death.

By 1.40pm, it was already too late for many of those in the path of the "inland tsunami" that engulfed communities west of Brisbane on January 10.

The speed of the disaster that overwhelmed emergency services and communications, leaving people to fend for themselves, is dramatically described in the interim report of the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry released yesterday.

The report details the confusion of that black Monday, the absence of warning of the lethal flash floods, and the desperation of victims and rescuers as they confronted the walls of water that killed 20 people in the Lockyer Valley, and a mother and son in range-top Toowoomba.

When all else failed, the locals were left to their own devices. Grantham men Ray van Dijk and Daniel Moore paddled through the churning water in a canoe, and between them reckon they saved "22 lives and 12 dogs".

Mr van Dijk, 44, told The Australian yesterday he might have been among the victims if his daughter had not interrupted his afternoon nap, saying: "Dad, Dad, there's water everywhere."

This gave him time to get Taliesha, 24, to safety on the roof of their home, from where he turned his attention to helping others. "We saved 22 lives and 12 dogs in Grantham, and that was with no official rescuers, no communications, nothing," Mr van Dijk said.

"You'd call triple-0 and call back again, but they'd just refer you on and say they can't deal with you now.

"The Bureau of Meteorology knew the water was coming 2 1/2 hours beforehand, but why couldn't we be warned?

"If they had a siren that was triggered to go off when the water reached a certain level, we would have had a little time."

Spring Bluff was the first to be hit, at 1.40pm, at the Toowoomba end of Murphys Creek, and endured 20 minutes of horror until the flash flood passed.

Then pregnant, Sarah Norman, 26, told the inquiry how the water swallowed massive gum trees, sheds and then her parents, Steve and Sandy Matthews.

Her sister Victoria, 16, and brother Sam, 20, found refuge in the ceiling of their flooded home. Tragically, the young man died last week in a fire while working on his late father's car.

The local authorities were beginning to respond, but it was from a flat-footed start. The regional council's disaster co-ordination centre had reopened only at midday on January 10, after an easing of some New Year flooding had led authorities to conclude, mistakenly, that the worst was over for the valley.

Worse yet, the local disaster management group chaired by Lockyer regional Mayor Steve Jones was working from a cobbled-together response plan that had not been ticked off by his council colleagues.

In those critical hours, as the tragedy unfolded, the running log of the disaster management group shows its attention was initially focused on larger population centres closer to Brisbane.

The town of Forest Hill was a particular concern, and would later have its population airlifted out by the RAAF.

Just before 1.35pm, Mr Jones reported to the group there had been heavy rain at Withcott, one of the outlying Lockyer communities, 116km west of Brisbane. By 2.20pm, reports were emerging of cars being swept away. "It does not seem that he (or the disaster management group) attributed any wider significance to the Withcott event; he thought it the product of an isolated cloudburst," the inquiry found.

By 2pm, tiny Postmans Ridge, 95km west of Brisbane, was being engulfed. A witness described seeing Murphys Creek boil out of its banks, smashing her home. Other houses were washed away, killing two people.

At nearby Helidon, the telemetre gauge showed the creek level rising from about 4m at 2.20pm to 12.66m at 2.50pm, at which point it failed. The Warrego Highway was flooded, forcing the Perry family on to the roof of their car. James Perry, 39, a racing steward, was carried away and drowned. Amazingly, his wife and their nine-year-old son survived. Mr Perry is among three people who remain missing in the Lockyer Valley, presumed dead.

At 2.30pm, the local SES controller put a team of volunteers in Gatton on standby to carry out precautionary door-knocking in Grantham, the worst hit of the Lockyer centres.

This was in the expectation that the hamlet would be hit by minor flooding, along the lines of what it had experienced through December and early January. They left Gatton at 2.50pm - far too late.

Locals say the flooding in Grantham was well under way by 2.30pm, and probably lasted until 4pm. The inquiry reported that the water presented as a "wave", probably 2-2.5m deep, "sweeping from the Lockyer Creek, across the paddocks and through the town", travelling at up to 3m a second.

By now, there was growing awareness of the unfolding chaos in Toowoomba, where Donna Rice, 43, and her 13-year-old son Jordan had been swept off the roof of their stranded car and drowned.

But the inquiry found it did not appear "any detailed information about the state of Lockyer Creek was conveyed to the local disaster group or the council".

At 3.30pm, the Bureau of Meteorology reported that the Lockyer Creek at Helidon had reached the alarming level of 12.68m, near what would be its peak. Another log entry confirms this was drawn to the attention of the local disaster group.

"A more percipient . . . group might earlier have deduced that flooding of the proportions experienced in the Murphys Creek waterway had serious implications for Lockyer Creek, and made efforts to keep abreast of exactly what was happening along the creek," the inquiry reported.

In mitigation, the report noted that the group was "trying to respond to flooding reports from numerous sources".

The BOM was not blameless: it had failed to act on its own data because a computerised tracking system had rejected the Helidon readings as incomplete.

Some Grantham residents were keeping close tabs on the BOM website of their own volition. One man actually logged off in disbelief after seeing the 12m reading for Lockyer Creek. When he fired up his computer, the reading was still there, so he scrambled and got his family out. They barely had time to grab a few personal effects before the muddy torrent swirled into their yard, the inquiry found.

Another local phoned the council to query the BOM's numbers. Was the gauge broken? she asked. The person in the council office brushed her off, saying it was the weather bureau's concern.

Doggedly, the woman got on to a local councillor, who advised there had been "some serious flooding" at Withcott. A relative driving towards Helidon phoned to say there was a "great deal of water coming". She and her family survived the flood.

The interim report of the inquiry details how others in Grantham received potentially life-saving calls from friends and relatives at Helidon - some were told a "wall of water" was on the way.

They responded in different ways. Many tried to move belongings to higher positions and their cars to safe ground, the inquiry reported. Some threw cherished items into a bag to flee; others, selflessly, went out to warn friends and neighbours of the danger.

"The common experience was that no one had time to do much before the water arrived; it was then a fight for survival," the inquiry reported.

It noted, pointedly, that "it does not seem to have occurred" to the disaster management group to attempt to contact residents in Grantham by phone. It had expected the flooding would be problematic, not catastrophic.

"It is unfortunate it was not not better informed, but given the patchy nature of the reports it received, the many incidents to which it was attempting to respond and the fact there was no precedent for the Lockyer Creek to surge through Grantham as it did that day, it is not surprising the disaster management group did not appreciate the real nature of the emergency," the interim report declares.

"An effective warning would have been one which told Grantham residents they should flee at once to preserve their lives. The commission does not consider the local disaster management group or the Lockyer Valley Regional Council should be regarded as culpable for failing to recognise how dire the risk was, or to give such a warning."

Additional reporting: Naomi Lim