Unprecedented use of the word unprecedented for floods that do have precedents

THIS is the worst misuse of a word in recorded history or at least since the last time it happened.

Unprecedented? ABC News on Tuesday:

AUTHORITIES are urging people to stay calm as Brisbane and Ipswich prepare for unprecedented flooding over the next two days.

Never mind the records! David Marr in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday:

THE rain stopped but the water kept coming all day. In the face of this catastrophe, old records don't mean much any more.

Unprecedented and unrecorded. Deborah's Diary on www.savethekoala.com:

I IMAGINE many of you are reading about the floods in Queensland. Mother Nature is obviously replenishing the tanks after many, many years of drought. That said, it is unprecedented and you have to think, is this normal (it has never been recorded before), or is this exactly what climate change predictions have said will occur in this amazing country of ours? I think this is the case but, like all of us, I have no idea where to start to try and change things.

The precedents. The record. Bureau of Meteorology, known floods in the Brisbane & Bremer River Basin:

14/1/1841 HIGHEST flood in Brisbane's recorded history. In 1896, JB Henderson, the government hydraulics engineer in an address to parliament, reported that he found by examination of earlier plans that the 1841 flood was [7cm] higher than the flood of 5th February 1893.

4/2/1893 Disastrous floods in the Brisbane River; 8 feet of water in Edward Street at the Courier building. Numbers of houses at Ipswich and Brisbane washed down the rivers. Seven men drowned through the flooding of the Eclipse Colliery at North Ipswich. Telegraphic and railway communication in the north and west interrupted.

Michael Collett, a producer for ABC News Online, on ABC Online's The Drum, on Wednesday:

AT first I was dumbfounded, amused even. Those from Toowoomba would have understood the joke. We're on a bloody mountain. We don't do floods. Puddles, occasionally. Well, we do floods now. The concept of flooding in Toowoomba is a joke no longer. Toowoomba does a flood.

The Brisbane Courier for June 24,1873, on "The Floods in Toowoomba":

THE heaviest rainfall ever recorded in this district occurred on Wednesday morning last from 11 o'clock on Tuesday night until about 2 o'clock on Wednesday morning. Sharp heavy showers were of frequent occurrence, but from that hour until 5am the rain descended literally in torrents, flooding the streets in a manner that was never before witnessed by the oldest inhabitant. Ruthven St, from the corner of Margaret St to the post office, was covered with water, while Russell St presented the appearance of a large swift running river. The stream at this point was about 80 yards wide, the waters running over the middle rail of the bridge and flooding Mr Stirling's smithy and the butcher's shop.

And another. The Advertiser, February 20, 1893:

FEBRUARY 18. It has rained incessantly in torrents here from Thursday afternoon until 6 o'clock last night, when the flood waters reached the highest level ever known at Toowoomba. Not only in Russell St was the flood higher than ever known before, but on East Swamp the waters [were] unprecedented in their height.

Here to help. Mary Gearin interviews Kevin Rudd on ABC 24 yesterday:

GEARIN: The cameras captured you today meeting a man who didn't want to leave his house, and he was a veteran of the 1974 floods. Did you come across that a lot, and are you concerned for those people?

Rudd: Yeah, they kind of make you want to pull your hair out sometimes [laughs]. They've got water levels rising and you're having a Socratic dialogue with somebody about why they should be moving out. I mean, strewth. Anyway, I put the coppers on to him, so we'll see what happens.

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