QLD Premier Flooding Press Conference 11 January 2011

Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Transcript: Premier Anna Bligh Press Conference 11 January 2011 9:30am
E & O E – PROOF ONLY
TRANSCRIPT
PRESS CONFERENCE
TUESDAY 11 JANUARY 2011, 9:30 AM
ISSUE: QUEENSLAND FLOODS

Premier Anna Bligh: Good morning. As you know, Queensland’s flood crisis deepened overnight and the situation continues to worsen today. We are seeing between 80 and 100 mm fall into the catchments around the Toowoomba and Lockyer Valley and into the Wivenhoe system and then into the south-west into towns like Dalby, Chinchilla and others. What this current bad weather is doing is hampering our search and rescue efforts, particularly into that Lockyer Valley area where we know we have people stranded in dire and critical circumstances. The constant rainfall also means that our modelling is seeing factors constantly change. And some of the predictions that I will talk to you about in a few moments need to be understood as of now and they will depend on continued rainfall. We have a grim and desperate situation in the Toowoomba and Lockyer Valley region.

We have eight confirmed deaths at this point but we expect that figure to rise and potentially quite dramatically. We have 72 people as of an hour ago who are unaccounted for and we fully expect that we may see that figure rise as well. We are hoping and praying that many of those 72 people have gone to safety overnight and will be found safe and well. But given the circumstances we hold very grave concerns for many of those people who are unaccounted for in this region. Many of the people who are stranded or unaccounted for are families and young children and some of those who have lost their lives overnight are young children including a mother and two children in a vehicle.

We have specialist teams who are all on standby in the region. The SERT team, the Queensland Police SERT team have been deployed overnight. We have specialist swift water rescue teams on standby. We also have additional fire and rescue teams. We are finding it very difficult to get these teams out and deployed because of the weather and the constantly changing water system. They are however, as I said, ready to deploy into that region as soon as we see any of this weather lift. We are also seeing flood levels rise in river systems right across the south-west, not only Dalby and Chinchilla evacuating people overnight…We now expect to see Warwick reach a peak equal to or greater than the peak last week by lunchtime today. Similarly we will see those waters affecting Stanthorpe, Goondiwindi, Texas, Yelarbon, Inglewood and all of those towns in those regions. The Condamine, the town of Condamine is also flooding with waters rapidly rising and we’ll be watching that town very, very closely. All vehicles that were damaged in Toowoomba in the CBD yesterday have now been searched by police and I’m relieved to say that we have not found anyone in those vehicles who is deceased or seriously…or anyone at all in those vehicles.

I can confirm that we have had one helicopter be able to get into the air briefly this morning who has confirmed that there appear to be no further people on rooftops in settled areas like Helidon and in the Grantham area however we cannot rule out that there may be people stranded on the rooftops of outlying properties and as soon as we can get helicopters into the air we intend to search those areas for those people.

Into the Wivenhoe system we’ve now seen because of continued heavy rainfall overnight further revised predictions about the Ipswich and Brisbane areas. Ipswich is now likely to see a flood river, level in the river hit about at least 16 metres. The hydrology reports indicate however that if the rain continues, and the Bureau is advising that it is set to continue, then we are likely to see anywhere up to 18m in the Ipswich river system. By comparison the 1974 flood saw close to 20m in Ipswich. What all of this means for the Wivenhoe catchment is that we will now have to remodel and plan for larger releases out of the Wivenhoe Dam to manage this in-flow. That means that the Brisbane area will now have to reconsider the implications of the water likely to come down out of Wivenhoe and revise up the weather that we are seeing swelling the Brisbane River and this in-stream flows will also increase.

The Brisbane Local Disaster Management Group will meet for the first time this morning at 10am. They will consider further the implications of this new modelling and advise residents accordingly. I say to all residents in the Brisbane, Ipswich and Lockyer Valleys for those of you who can please listen to radio reports. We will be updating people throughout the day. It is a constantly changing situation. I stress that the releases being made from Wivenhoe Dam are not optional. There is no discretion here. This is how this dam operates. We need to make sure that we protect people down this river system by operating the dam safely and appropriately.

Ladies and gentlemen as you will hear from further reports from the Deputy Commissioner of Police this has been a night of extraordinary events. We’ve seen acts of extraordinary bravery and courage from our emergency workers. We know they are out there on the frontline desperately trying to begin their search and rescue efforts and we know that we have people stranded and people lost. We are doing our best to protect our emergency workers during this severe weather. We are equally doing our best to get everything that we can into that region to save and rescue people.

There’s no doubt that we are now in I think a very different sort of disaster. And what it is doing is testing our emergency response and it will test us as communities and as people. This weather I think is…it might be breaking our hearts at the moment but it will not break our will. What we have out there on the frontline is some of the best trained people in Australia. And they are going to protect these communities and we are going to make sure that we keep everybody that we can as safe as humanly possible. I’d like to ask the Deputy Commissioner to make some comments.

Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart: Thank you Premier, good morning everyone. Certainly our focus at the moment is as it always is in response, personal safety. We have a major search and rescue operation underway right throughout the Lockyer Valley. As the Premier said Toowoomba is fairly stable – we don’t think that we will see any further deaths out of the Toowoomba CBD. But our search and rescue activities in the Murphys Creek and Grantham area in particular certainly it is expected that we will find further persons deceased in those areas. The numbers we just don’t know at this stage.

What I would ask though is one thing – the rain and the weather pattern at the moment is variable, it is hampering our search and rescue operations. Access to the area through roads is very difficult for us. Our helicopter assets are having difficulty because of the rain pattern moving around that area. But the one contributing factor which is getting in our road is onlookers now. And I would stress to people that any diversion of our precious emergency services to deal with simple rubberneckers and onlookers could cost a life. I would ask people to be sensible and if they have no reason to be there stay out and get out of those areas. Thank you.

Premier: Just before calling Jim Davidson is should have also said that we are continuing to make evacuations across the Lockyer Valley area. We have people being evacuated from Toogoolawah and Esk, 200 evacuations likely to occur this morning at Forest Hill, although we expect they’ll be evacuated into a, an evacuation centre in a higher ground at Forest Hill. We have also seen overnight evacuations in Nanango. We also have the community of Cherbourg now completely cut-off and food supplies being taken in. there are multiple breaks in the road between Ipswich and Toowoomba; people should not be driving on those roads and we are, continue to need those roads to be free from other vehicles than emergency vehicles.

I’ll ask Jim Davidson to give us a bit of an update of what the weather is doing and some background to the event that has led to this terrible tragedy.

Jim Davidson: Thank you Premier. Good morning everyone. The super rainstorm we saw yesterday over Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley was an extreme event. And you’d say it was towards the top of the severe weather and flash flooding scale. It was very unique. What were the circumstances that set up this particular event? It all started, I guess, a few days ago with that upper low which we’re all tracking, the one that moved out to see off Capricornia then moved back onshore again. So that was the, the synoptic, the larger scale feature which produced this exceptional storm, but there were other considerations all on the local scale – the saturated catchments; of course we’ve had flooding now for many weeks, many months and Toowoomba itself actually had upwards, I think, of 100mm on the previous day so the ground was very wet. The escarpment, the rain’s just on, on the doorstep of Toowoomba, that would have served to produce uplift for the rain and precipitation. So once again, it was a local factor which contributed. The relatively large area of this rainstorm, the, the rainstorm itself wasn’t that exceptional in terms of appearance on radar and satellite but it did cover a fairly large area. The, the rainfall reports we did get from Toowoomba said they received about 80mm in half an hour, or a little bit more than half an hour. We’re, we’re fairly confident that if we had rainfall reports on a much tighter scale, smaller scale, we would have seen 100 to 150mm easy in that general area. And of course the other consideration was the funnelling into Lockyer Creek, having Toowoomba situated where it is, Lockyer Creek immediately underneath the range, it all came together, as I said, on a very local scale. Now when it comes to forecasting, the computer models that we use aren’t run at a high enough resolution to pick up these sort of very small-scale weather features. Every now and again – I hope it doesn’t happen very often, it won’t happen very often, I can reassure people that - we will get one of these very extreme events which fall within our resolution of our computer models. But our forecasters are ever on the alert, monitoring the weather as it happens, and yesterday we were monitoring that particular rainstorm as it moved across South East Queensland, but as I said earlier, for all intents and purposes, we were satisfied at the time that the severe weather warning, which spoke about potential flash flooding in the Toowoomba region would cover that circumstance. As we know now it didn’t. When, when we did become aware that the rainfall was extreme in the Toowoomba area and that flooding was starting to occur, we immediately jumped into flash flood warnings and we turned on the standard emergency warning signal, and we made calls to numerous agencies, relevant agencies, authorities responsible for policing the Lockyer Valley and surrounds – the police for example and Emergency Management Queensland – and alerted to the fact that we were, that we did have a serious situation on our hands. I might stop there but I’m happy for any questions. Thank you.

Journalist: Jim can I just get you, did you say that this could not be forecast? Is that correct?

Davidson: Perhaps I shouldn’t say it could not be forecast but I think it’s important to say that it’s very difficult to forecast. I’m not saying we miss all events of this nature but every now and again one will be, the combination of factors on the local scale will produce an extreme event of this nature. And it’s not always we have the science and the capacity to see this before it happens.

Journalist: What were the exceptional circumstances here? Are you saying that, you know, it was heavy rain, but you’ve seen heavy rain before, it’s a bit larger than normal but that’s about all really?

Davidson: Well not, not really because, I said before, there were those other factors operating; that saturation… everything was saturated. So this rain, when it fell, it wasn’t absorbed into the ground. It stayed on top of the ground and eventually moved into Lockyer Creek. The escarpment, um, having that storm approach the escarpment, I guess even on that particular angle meant the uplift was, was very strong. So the cloud and precipitation uplifted and when cloud and precipitation lift like that it drops huge amounts of rain. So it all came together in a very local area within a short period of time. It could well be that the entire storm didn’t really impact on the, on the Toowoomba area. But just for half an hour or so… the actual rainstorm took much longer than half an hour to actually pass over Toowoomba, whereas the rain event was more like 30 minutes or so.

Journalist: And you were saying, sorry, I didn’t quite follow you. You said it measured 80 mm in 30 minutes but it was more likely to be 100 to 150?

Davidson: Yeah, because of the very small scale of what occurred, we do have a fairly good network of rainfall reporting in that area but not dense enough to pick up everything that fell on the ground. So we suspect with what we saw, the 8 metre wall of water going down the Lockyer Creek, there much have been falls, maybe even of 200mm in places, perhaps on top of the range or just down from the range at Toowoomba. Now that, if I could just say, a fall of 80 mm in half an hour or so, we’re looking at about a 1 in 100 year event for that area. Now we get 1 in 100 year events fairly frequently across Queensland for a particular town or city. So not great, but as I said we’re almost certain there were much higher falls close by.

Journalist: Premier, you said last night that you were fearful there could still be people spending the night on rooftops. You’ve said that that, for the greater residential areas has got the all clear. Are we sure that those people are safe? In those residential areas?

Premier: We can say that we don’t have any visual sightings from helicopter of people on rooftops in Helidon or Grantham. We are unable to say that there may not be some people on rooftops in more isolated, rural properties. Remember that this is a rural part of Queensland. There are many people who do not live in town. Similarly, we don’t know necessarily where those people, if there were any people, who have subsequently got back into the buildings there were sitting on top of as some of the water’s gone down and we won’t know that until we can get either water boats or a helicopter in there.

Journalist: In some of those pictures, that we’ve seen have just been so heartbreaking. You said earlier that a lot of those missing are young families.

Premier: We have some 72 people unaccounted for an obviously they span from the very young right through to the very old but we do have some whole families who, at this stage, are unaccounted for. We, I think, have already seen absolute tragedy with the 8 deaths that are known; it does include 2 children who are quite young. But we know that at least one…sorry. The first four were two children who were quite young. In the second four, a mother and two children. So half of the 8 so far are children. This took everybody so unawares that there was no opportunity, in most cases, for people to get to safety. So we do anticipate that these numbers are very preliminary. Until we get our emergency people into those areas, we really can’t give you anything more certain, other than to say, in all honesty, we hold very grave concerns for a number of these people who are not accounted for and we are anxiously, anxiously worrying that we will see this toll rise.

Journalist: At what point did the message go out to evacuate those residents, and why did it take so long?

Stewart: Are you talking in terms of the emergency evacuation signal? That was enacted as soon as we could but there is a time-lag from when that goes, when the process starts to when it actually physically goes out. Certainly there was no evacuation in Toowoomba. There was no warning in Toowoomba because of the nature of event. And as I’ve explained previously, when we’re dealing with floods like we’ve seen throughout the state over the last couple of weeks, most of that we can predict, we have time to get in to deal with it. This was purely an emergency response situation with no warning at all, basically, to emergency services. We simply had to react the best way we could. And all emergency services swung into action as they would normally do in any such event.

Journalist: There’s been more warning though for Grantham and further down, after Toowoomba?

Stewart: Certainly the volume of water caught, I think, most people surprise and I am not yet sure, because we haven’t been able to go back and tally this up, what emergency warnings went out to the lower, lower Lockyer area.

Journalist: Can you just describe the situation in Grantham at the moment. I know last night you were saying there were 30 or so people in the school hall.. (inaudible)

Stewart: No. Certainly Grantham is one of the focus but the other one is that Murphy’s Creek and Withcott area. That’s the other area we’re having difficulty getting in to and as most of that area is, not isolated, but rural property on acreages and that sort of thing and it’s going to take us a long time today to get to every one of those areas. I mean, the sheer scale of this operation is quite daunting when you look at the number of places, areas and creeks that have been affected.

Journalist: Can you give us any more information on the 8 victims? We know that there were four children and two mothers. Can you tell us about the others? And where these people are from?

Stewart: Certainly there was an elderly lady in house at Helidon who was found deceased as a result of the flood, a gentleman, and a middle-age man and a younger male in the Murphy’s Creek area have been confirmed deceased and, as you said, then there were the two mothers and their children. They were both in vehicles. One was in Toowoomba in the initial, the initial phase and the second vehicle was down at Grantham.

Premier: Can I say these tragic deaths overnight are a very timely reminder to everybody that this fast-moving water kills. I saw images on every news station last night in other parts of Queensland of people jumping off bridges into this sort of water and people attempting to drive through quite heavy water over bridges and over roads. Our emergency services are up to this task but we do not need to challenge them further with people doing stupid things. I just send out the most heartfelt appeal, please do not cross roads that is flooded and do not jump into these waters. We need no more timely reminder than the shocking tragedies last night that this water is deadly and it’s not to be played with.

Journalist: There’s been reports of freezers and larger objects floating down the river near Coronation Drive as well. People around Brisbane should be careful of projectiles as well?

Stewart: Oh certainly and we know that in the last couple of weeks there have been times, because of the debris coming down the Brisbane River, Brisbane River even, that the City Cat service has to be suspended and that’s done by the Brisbane City Council. So anywhere where there are flood waters, people do not know what’s under that surface; it could be anything. We, as the Premier said, we’re pleading to people, do not become a statistic. There is no need to go into this flood water. As we’ve said all the way along, we can replace fridges, freezers, houses, we just cannot replace people.

Journalist: The rain today that we’re seeing, is that likely to produce another super rain storm or anything like that?

Davidson: The simple answer is no. I think I said before, I can reassure people that it’s very unlikely that we’ll see an event of this magnitude again, particularly in the short-term, like this season. However, there is a fairly decent rainband at the moment between the Sunshine Coast and the Granite Belt and we are monitoring that very closely. We’re getting reports in that rainband of up to 80mm an hour and we do have the standard emergency warning signal turned on. We do expect though that this particular rainband will the last in the series. Once we see this weaken in the next few hours, we should then enter a period where we just generally see the rain easing over South East Queensland and tomorrow should be a much better day than today.

Journalist: Is that right for Brisbane as well?

Davidson: That’s correct.

Journalist: I heard it could be worse for us tonight.

Davidson: Sorry?

Journalist: I thought we were looking at possible worse conditions tomorrow?

Davidson: Not weather wise. Just a shower or two, or a few showers for the rest of the week.

Journalist: And Jim, the incident in Murphy Creek, is that making you look at things differently and put out warnings more quickly, even if it isn’t as much rain as what you initially think?

Davidson: Well we issue warnings always as quickly as we can, and as I think I explained, this one was different, this super rainstorm, it was something which any forecaster in the world may, you know, may not have issued a warning for. So, you know, it was exceptional. But at the same time I should add that, like all events of this nature, we will be reviewing the situation in partnership with our colleagues, our state government colleagues and the like, and looking at ways that perhaps we might improve the warning system in the future. But every now and again, very rarely, we might see something like this happen. It’s unfortunate… hopefully in the future the computer models will be run at tighter resolution and these sort of very local features will be picked up. Thank you.

Journalist: Premier, has Toowoomba been declared a disaster zone?

Premier: We’ve had a number of incidents overnight that we’re now looking at declaring, rather than local government areas, a significant region of Queensland as a disaster zone. So we’ll advise you a little further this morning. We’re just looking for an appropriate northern line and everything south of that will just be declared because we expect to see, as I said, over the next few days not only Toowoomba but Warwick, Stanthorpe, Condamine and other areas back into the disaster range. I should say that we do expect to see both, in terms of things getting worse – and you might have been thinking about what we said yesterday, Cathy – what we’re expecting is that Ipswich over the next 24 hours is likely to start to see the waters peaking, and in the Brisbane area Wednesday/Thursday will be the time when we see the waters hit their high mark for this week. So over the next two to three days Ipswich and Brisbane will be our high watch areas here in the South East, but equally we’ve got a number of places in the South West where we anticipate evacuations and continued problems in some small and quite large communities.

Journalist: That mega-zone, the disaster zone, will that be the first time that’s happened?

Premier: I’m double checking that for you but I suspect yes.

Journalist: The 16 to 18 metres in Ipswich, do you have any modelling of how many homes will be inundated then?

Premier: No, the Ipswich City Council is doing that work at the moment. Clearly there are many more parts that have been settled since 1974 or since we’ve seen rivers at that height. The current hydrology indicates that we, we will expect to see 16 metres. The rise from 16 to 18 will depend very much on the rainfall and as you’ve just heard from Jim there’s, you know, that that’s not entirely clear because the catchment that’s feeding this is not just here in Brisbane, it’s way up into the Lockyer Valley. So what’s happened to the flash flooding in the Lockyer River is now turning into a significant river flood as it gathers strength coming down that system.

Journalist: And are you looking at problems with getting supplies into that Lockyer Valley… what’s the situation?

Premier: We’ve got challenges getting into a number of these communities, getting our emergency personnel in and getting supplies in and yes, they will be issues that have got… this is our number one priority this morning and we have an entire strategic team in the major incident rooms, with Queensland Police working on these issues. We also anticipate that we may see supply issues into parts of central and northern Queensland, given that we have now seen cuts to the inland highway that was taking supplies as an alternative to the Bruce Highway. So we’ve got quite a lot of work ahead of us ensuring basic supplies are logistically into a number of those communities.

Journalist: There is a fair amount of panic I think for Brisbane now. How many homes, do we know how many homes stand to be affected when it peaks tomorrow?

Premier: The Brisbane Local Disaster Management Group are meeting at 10am this morning. The purpose of that meeting is to look at the new data and advise people accordingly. So, in the interests of accuracy I think it’s important that we wait until the Lord Mayor and the local disaster management group here in Brisbane meets for the first time this morning. I do think that it’s important to understand that without Wivenhoe we would have this, a very significant flood in Brisbane right now. That dam is keeping that 1,200 mega litres, a million litres a day, off and out of our streets but the circumstances with this continued rainfall are putting pressure on all parts of that system. So there’s no need to panic in Brisbane but there is a need to get good, accurate information and listen to the bulletins. This is a changing situation, but one that is being managed.

Journalist: Are you happy with how emergency services handled this situation, we had emergency services in the chopper that we had for a long looking for those people on top of roofs before they could actually get there themselves.

Premier: We will have a total review of all of the disaster response over the last, for this entire event. Given what’s happened in the Toowoomba and Lockyer Valley, that review will have a particular focus on that event. But I have to say the extreme nature of this event, the rapid escalation of it in a very short period of time, did require every effort to be made and I recognise that in some cases news helicopters were also being used. That is, I think, an appropriate response and I thank those news helicopters who made them available. This was an all hands on deck, no questions asked, get in and do whatever you can event. And that’s what we saw. There are people alive today because of that attitude that prevailed yesterday evening and I thank everybody who was part of it and assisted in any way in any of those rescues. As I said, and you saw it last night, it happened so quickly it was every, every hand to the wheel and I’m very pleased that we managed to get so many people, 43 rooftop rescues, many of them at night time, done overnight. It’s, it’s very heartening to see that sort of response, and as I said, many, many acts of courage and bravery behind every one of those rescues.

Journalist: Premier, what are your plans for today now?

Premier: I’m here today working with the Disaster Management Coordinating group. It had been my intention to try and get into these areas – that’s not possible. This is still an operational zone and it’s not appropriate and not possible at this stage to get in. We expect to see, potentially… well we know that there are between four and five areas where the road is cut from Ipswich to Toowoomba. It’s not clear that they’ll be clear for some time. Similarly, airflight into the region is not possible. But even if it was, frankly, we are still in a desperate search and rescue phase. This is not the time for me to visiting and talking to locals. I’ll do that as soon as it’s appropriate.

Journalist: Back on Brisbane, are we still looking at a three metre peak tomorrow afternoon? Has that changed?

Davidson: Okay. The answer to that, the answer to that one is the hydrologists are now working with Brisbane City Council and SEQ Water and we do expect the next warning out very shortly. So they’re recalculating because the rain fall is changing all the time and the releases from Wivenhoe. So there’s all those factors operating.

Journalist: Do you think you’ll brief the PM this afternoon?

Premier: Potentially. We’ll let you know. It is a rapidly changing situation. The extent of the rainfall last night has changed all of the models and we’ll be updating people as soon as we can. Thank you.

ENDS

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