Me interviewing the owner of a scuba gear shop affected by the flash flood. We were both fully aware of the irony. Check out the high-water mark in the bottom right-hand corner.
Queensland is currently enduring its worst wet season in decades. My home town got flooded again (the house escaped this time), roads are cut everywhere and at the time of writing, floods are bearing down on Brisbane and three-quarters of the state has been declared a disaster zone.
Yesterday a literal wall of water swept through the Toowoomba CBD, tossing cars around like they were matchsticks and sweeping people to their deaths. Luckily my house and our office was safely away from all the danger, but it caused utter pandemonium.
To say that it was unexpected would be a gross understatement. Toowoomba is located on top of a mountain, with a little stream running through the town… occasionally. Mountaintops generally don’t flood, so a lot of people don’t have flood insurance.
ABC Local Radio is the national emergency broadcaster, and they are doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone across the state updated on what is happening over the radio.
However, I’m now 100% an online journo. No radio or newspaper masthead’s coat tails to ride, just our website which is creeping towards its hard launch in March. Here’s a little look into what what we did, and why we did it.
On the gear:
At Finda we have a HD digital video camera, A Canon 1000D stills camera, a fantastic CMS and most importantly… two multimedia journalists and a multimedia editor all in the same office!
User contributions:
Most major media outlets (us included) relied heavily on amateur footage of the Toowoomba flash flood. Seriously, our tiny stream turned into a torrent within ten minutes, so we had no warning given to send out crews. These videos have been astonishing, and my workmate Steph made a page grouping a bunch of them together.
One of the many great things about the APN/Finda Content Management system is how easily we can integrate YouTube videos.
When the site launches fully, we’ll have a lot more opportunities for user-contributed stuff to be showcased.
So… what have you actually been doing?
Aside from keeping the Facebook and Twitter accounts updated and moderating trolls on the Facebook site, Steph and I hit the streets to take pictures of the aftermath and talk to people.
This morning, our editor Cam told us to go out and speak to people whose businesses had been affected by the flash flood, and to get footage of the clean-up. Steph shot photos and video, I drove and interviewed people.
When we got back to the office, Steph edited what she’d done and I wrote a package story on the people we’d spoken to. Cam subbed it (checked it for style and spelling errors) and pieced it together while I wrote and Steph edited.
Here’s the final piece. I’m pretty happy with what we all put together.
In the middle of all that, Cam got word that people were panic buying something fierce over at the Wilsonton Woolies. I drove over and did a quick yarn on that, which you can read here. The headline is a tad beat-upish, but blame that on Cam.
We’ve been getting record site traffic through all of this, which is a great thing. I’m sure a lot of that is to do with our Facebook page, which is very popular.
Other:
- I did a bit of a holder story on the implications of a La Nina system before the flood happened
- Check out our galleries of the flood, the aftermath and the clean-up.
- This awful weather isn’t going away. Any donations to the Premier’s Flood Appeal would be greatly appreciated.
IMPORTANT NOTE, 12th January:
I wrote this post after two days into this disaster/crisis, when we were only covering Toowoomba. Since then I’ve been into the Lockyer Valley and seen the utter devastation that has hit the people down there in towns such as Withcott, Murphy’s Creek, Helidon and especially poor old Grantham. You can keep track of my movements at my Twitter, and a list of links to my stories here.
The next zine will be all about the floods – the stuff I’ve covered for work and the stuff my friends and family have experienced back in Central Queensland. All my thoughts and feelings on being a professional gawker and nuisance will be in that. All proceeds will be donated to local flood appeals.
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The people in the flood zine – how are they now?
It’s been a month since the January 10 flash floods that tore strips off Toowoomba and destroyed the Lockyer Valley. The first run of the flood zine is almost sold out, which is pretty exciting. There are more copies on the way and I’m going to keep selling them until demand drops off. If you’d like a copy, Smells Like Zines distro is selling them through their web store for AUD$3 + postage. All the money I get from them will go to local flood appeals.
I visited the Lockyer Valley on the anniversary of the floods to check in on the people at Postmans Ridge that I wrote about in the flood zine, as well as visiting Grantham now that the road into the town is open. A lot of the hard rubbish has been carted away, but there is still plant debris everywhere. It’ll be decades before the natural environment recovers.
The survivors are having a hard time too. People I spoke to immediately after the flood who had vowed to rebuild are starting to realise exactly how difficult and draining it will be. They’re depressed and fatigued – they sound like my parents did after the 2008 Emerald floods ruined our family home. On top of all this, the survivors have to deal with the deaths of their friends and neighbours. It’s incredibly tough.
Sylvia Baillie’s body was found on the 17th of January. It took a few weeks for the DNA identification test results to come back, which need to be positive before people can officially be added to the death toll. Sylvia is the 23rd official death of the flood. There are still many more people missing and the recent bout of hot weather is making finding and identifying bodies all the more difficult.
The block where her house used to stand is neatly fenced off, with a small white cross hammered into the earth next to the foundations.
I checked in with Barry Bull down the road. You might remember him as the guy who owns the Packed To The Rafters car, or the guy who had raw sewage go through his house along with flood water.
Local tradies have helped them out, re-tiling and re-painting their house for free, but the amount of work needed to get the property back to how it was is daunting.
You can read the story of my visit with Barry here, along with photo galleries and footage of the flood itself, courtesy of Barry’s daughter Charlotte.
Bull family toilet - after the flood, then after the clean-up. Check out the high-water mark!
The highway to Grantham opened last week, so I was told to go there and take photos. The place was a ghost town in the true sense of the word. I didn’t see a single building that wasn’t badly damaged and the only people there were police and contractors putting up power poles so the electricity could be re-connected to the town. If this was Grantham cleaned up and open to the public, I’m glad I didn’t see it earlier. It was utterly heartbreaking.
My story and photo gallery of Grantham can be found here.